Film reviews: Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger | Practical Magic 2

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger (15) ★★★★

Practical Magic 2 (12A) ★★

Documenting last year’s world-conquering re-union tour, Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is like the band themselves: brilliant, brash, funny, ridiculous, overblown and surprisingly sentimental. Kicking off with the rehearsal period that brought Noel and Liam Gallagher together in the same room for the first time in 15 years, it dispenses with the drama of whether or not the whole thing will descend into chaos early on (Liam’s prompt arrival and departure is hilarious) before broadening out into an exploration of the Oasis phenomenon as they try to “change the narrative” about what they were, and are, all about.

Because it’s Oasis there’s no attempt intellectualise their success, but the film does tap into their primal appeal and you come away with a newfound respect for their ability to distil a moment in time into anthemic songs that continue to mean so much to so many. As is de rigueur with rock docs these days, fans get their own say with cut-aways to interviews with people whose lives have been enhanced by the band’s music – a technique that writer Steven Knight and directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern occasionally over-egg, but always in the knowledge that they can cut back to the live footage (which looks and sounds great), or pull out another savant-like insight from Liam or amusingly honest confession from Noel to remind us why they mattered in the first place.

There’s more 90s revivalism in Practical Magic 2, a belated sequel to 1998’s misbegotten Sandra Bullock/Nicole Kidman star vehicle about a pair of sibling witches destined to lose any man they fall for to a centuries-old curse supposedly designed to protect them from heartache. That film featured a weird domestic abuse subplot and was tonally all over the place. It was also a box-office bomb, so quite why Bullock and Kidman have chosen to revisit it is a mystery, more so given how shoddy the whole endeavour is.

Respectively returning as Sally and Gillian Owens, their characters are basically unchanged, though this time out the curse – lifted at the end of the first film – has been passed on to Sally’s 20-something daughters (Joey King and Maisie Williams), who seem to be ageing at an even weirder pace than their elders given they were tweens in the first film. The daffy plot kicks into gear when King’s character, Kylie, tells her college boyfriend she loves him and he ends up in a coma, forcing her to travel to England to break the curse at its source.

Sally and Gillian duly follow, weighed down with over-sized luggage, a nonsensical joke that’s funny precisely never. Once in London, they team up with a hunky dark arts professor (Lee Pace) who provides some romantic interest for the spinster-like Sally even though they’re suspicious of his motivations. Like the first film, it doesn’t make a lick of sense, its confused mythology and that’ll-do plotting an ongoing curse that neither the combined star-wattage of Bullock and Kidman, nor acclaimed director Susanne Bier, can break.

Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger is in cinemas from 9 September; Practical Magic 2 is in cinemas from 11 September

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