Supersonic

Mat Whitecross learned his trade at Michael Winterbottom's Revolution Films, co-directed The Road to Guantánamo, and made the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll before turning to music documentary. Oasis: Supersonic came to him with a formidable pedigree behind it: Asif Kapadia as executive producer and James Gay-Rees as producer, the pair fresh from the Academy Award for Amy. It was released on 2 October 2016, distributed by Entertainment One in Britain and A24 in the United States.

The film borrows the Amy method. There are no talking heads; the voices of Noel and Liam Gallagher, their bandmates and the people around them run beneath a dense collage of archive: early gigs, television appearances, contemporaneous interviews, tour-bus footage. Whitecross keeps his focus deliberately narrow, following the band from their formative years in Manchester to the height of their success in the Britpop era of the mid-1990s. The effect is of watching the story unfold at the speed at which it happened, with the brothers' mutual antagonism and mutual dependence always audible beneath the noise.

Reviews were largely positive: 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, whose consensus praised its appreciative and stirring look at the early years. David Ehrlich of IndieWire found it a poignant study of one of the most openly fractious sibling rivalries of its time. Others, Peter Bradshaw among them, regretted what it leaves out: the chart war with Blur, the flirtation with New Labour, the long decline. That narrowness is also its strength. As a portrait of a band at the moment it became a phenomenon, it is hard to beat.