Anne Hathaway fans, her fourth movie of 2026, “The End of Oak Street” (2026), is out, and she kicks ass. Starting in July 1982, the neighborhood of Flowervale, Michigan is a thriving suburb, but it gets transported two hundred million years to the past, which forces the Platt family of four to figure out how to evade becoming dinosaur dinner. How will this family stay together and survive? Writer and director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows,” “Under the Silver Lake”) and composer Michael Giacchino beat Steven Spielberg and John Williams at their own game with a few unconventional twists leading to a fun summer popcorn film.
Most survival disaster films are about reuniting a family, and “The End of Oak Street” is no different. It takes awhile for it to find its momentum beyond screaming at dinosaurs, but it does and ends up being quite satisfying. Denise (Hathaway) is frustrated that her husband, Greg (smiling hottie Ewan McGregor), ignores reality and favors optimism instead of facing difficulties head on as a united front. Their daughter, aspiring astronomer and Carl Sagan fan, Audrey (Maisy Stella from “My Old Ass”), is on her way to an affordable college, not her dream school, Cornell. Thirteen-year-old Brian (Christian Convery, “Cocaine Bear,” “The Monkey,” “Frankenstein”) has been getting into trouble and is beginning to get interested in girls such as the new girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), but is still childlike and adores the family dog, Starbuck (Brisket, a cattle dog).
If “The End of Oak Street” has a bit of a flaw, it is the unclear trajectory of the story. Initially it feels as if it is Brian’s movie complete with the friends on bikes, attracting unwanted attention from older kids and the seeds of puberty, but have no fear, it is more of an ensemble cast. In the act prior to the denouement, “The End of Oak Street” practically wags its finger at the audience as if to chastise those assumptions. Brian’s hard-earned lesson is that the world does not revolve around him, and he has a lot of growing up to do when it comes to his role in other people’s lives. He gradually realizes that he is not a main character. Brian may be a surrogate for Mitchell. Audrey starts at the bottom of the social hierarchy for being a nerd among other things, but her time in the past actually gives her a boost that she did not get in her present day. The real main character is Denise as she tries to balance her family and her need to fulfill her life’s ambitions. Greg and Denise’s relationship is the source of real drama, and their effort to keep each other and their children alive reveals that they are both right regarding their approach to tackling problems. Overall, all the relationships, including with the supporting characters, avoids being saccharine while also not being as bleak as they should be considering the set up. After all, the human beings are at the bottom of the food chain.
Everyone has the survival skills of a fly, but the shotguns and sledgehammer help (missed opportunity for a Peter Gabrel needle drop). They never lower their voices and bellow quite a bit to get other human beings’ attention. They do stupid things. All that headphone use has clearly damaged their hearing, so they never notice a dinosaur sneaking up on them until they are close. All of them should be dead. People do die, and Mitchell is roughest on the guys with a particular proclivity towards leg injuries. What is that about? He dedicates “The End of Oak Street” to his father so it is all love. It feels as if he is treating the “Falling Down” men in crisis trope gently and with love by letting dinosaurs beat them into submission so they can start relying on women and decenter themselves.
“The End of Oak Street” may be my favorite natural predator movie because these dinosaurs only kill when they are hungry and lose interest in the screaming human beings once they have one to chow down on. Most movies, especially with sharks (talking to you “The Devil’s Mouth”), just have the beast willy nilly killing people before the shark can even finish its first meal. It is a flaw of most movies. Also, these are not your “Jurassic” franchise dinosaurs. These look rough and act brutal. Some have feathers, and others have fur. Plus, they have their own vibrant lives and are clearly psyched about their new digs with abundant food supply. If there is a reason to criticize the film, it is entirely too comfortable with killing cats. The fauna looks fake and already dated, but let’s sign a waiver. It is always nice to have dinosaurs even if some of them are unrecognizable. Hint: it is nice to see the White Worm get work again. Looks better than ever.
Just because “The End of Oak Street” is immensely fun, it is not perfect. It is one of those movies that makes the Eighties seem more pristine and ideal than it was. The nostalgia is heavy handed instead of lived in. It is also anachronistic in the way that it depicts race relations and attitudes towards same sex relationships (hello, the disparate treatment of Haitian immigrants and the start of the AIDS pandemic). Hell, it is anachronistic now. Whitewashing that era’s multitude of sins is a dangerous move because revisionist history is exactly what is not needed in a time when we are in danger of repeating a lot of history. Let’s say that Mitchell is aspiring to a Huxtable aspirational image, not realism. After all, it is a movie about time travel and dinosaurs.
“The End of Oak Street” could have collapsed under the weight of its genres or mistakenly tried to step into the shoes of “Land of the Lost.” It has a decent sense of humor, which it displays more as it approaches the end. The stakes increase in an unexpected way, and it even threatens the dinosaurs, which was unexpected. The time travel issue may lose some people as it becomes essential to the resolution. Does it make no sense? Yes. Will you still enjoy it? Absolutely. Most may not mind because though flawed, it still feels well-earned because everyone got tortured or ripped to shreds. If you have epilepsy, and light can trigger you, skip the closing credits.
Visually, “The End of Oak Street” needed to pull back on the excessive split diopter use when the foreground and background is in focus at the same time. Also in the opening, choosing to have the characters in movement while the camera is moving results in not getting a good look at any of the characters’ faces and did not work emotionally as possibly planned. Otherwise, the pacing on the dinosaur reveal was delicious, and composition when they hunt people.
“The End of Oak Street” is a good time! If you are a dinosaur fan or enjoy anyone in the cast, it is a must-see film. You know that Mitchell knocked it out of the park if the characters keep doing dumb things, and you still do not want them to die.
