First impressions of The End of Oak Street

In The End of Oak Street, which plays more like a mid-’80s, R-rated Joe Dante flick than a mid-’80s, PG-13 Steven Spielberg flick (and in this case, I mean that as a compliment), writer-director David Robert Mitchell unleashes fuzzy, feathery varieties of Jurassic Park’s killing-machine dinos into the driveways and above-ground swimming-pooled backyards of a mid-’80s Michigan suburb. These monsters have the mean-spiritedness of Dante’s Gremlins, tearing up and exposing the not-so-buried troubles of a middle-class community, one that resembles the anxious Tom Hanks cul-de-sac of The ’Burbs. 

With wry amusement and a penchant for sucker-punching the audience with abrupt dino-violence, Mitchell (who brought us It Follows and Under the Silver Lake) tracks the Platts, a fracturing family of four. The marriage of parents Greg and Denise is already in trouble. But the family’s future looks even bleaker when they wake up screaming to the fact that their neighborhood has fallen through a time warp into the age “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.” 

Once the mayhem begins, Mitchell proves himself as playfully clever, efficient, and edgy within this summer-movie paradigm. (This surprises me, after the meandering, uneven Under the Silver Lake, which has more in common with The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski than anything by Dante or Spielberg.) It’s hard to escape the notion that he’s rising to a perceived dare: Everybody complains about how far the Jurassic franchise has fallen from the original masterpiece — but can you do better? Yes, says Mitchell. Yes, I can.

And he’s right. He pokes fun at the series’ conventions, even as he plays the vibes of so many ‘80s summer blockbusters, but he does so with deep affection rather than cynicism. Supporting characters are all one-note in amusing, annoying, or endearing ways. (I half-expected Jesse Plemons to show up reprising his role from 2018’s Game Night, although he’d be in the wrong decade. Maybe he could step through a portal from the future?) Pop culture references and period-decor details will delight Gen-Xers like me: Brian’s a Battlestar Galactica fan, Audrey has the exact red-plastic/white-drawer desk caddy for paper clips and erasers that I had as a middle-schooler, and Dad drinks from the same heavy, green-textured drinking glass my grandparents used.

The camera is more curious about what dinosaurs are up to when they're not wreaking havoc than we’re used to. You may well wish you could un-see some of their recreational activities, although I’d love to see my neighbors renting some of those spiky-but-docile dino-tortoises to gnaw at their unnecessarily manicured lawns.

It’s as if Mitchell’s on a mission to remind us that a compact, 99-minute action movie can be supremely satisfying, far more satisfying, in fact, than the bloated slogs that franchise-driven summer blockbusters have become. Oak Street is blessedly unburdened by lore or half-baked character backstories. It scares us. It makes us laugh. It surprises us. It does all of this with a pleasantly retro score by Michael Giacchino. And it sends us home ready to recommend it to friends, and maybe even eager to see it again.

That’s not to say that the Platt family couldn’t have used some more character development on the page. It’s to the credit of the four lead actors that the film that this family comes alive and develops compelling chemistry. We believe in what’s happening because each one of them commits fully to the ridiculous premise and the frantic pace of this hilarious nostalgia trip. 

Playing Greg, the pathetic Platt patriarch who can’t admit yet that he’s lost his job, Ewan McGregor seems awkwardly uncertain of the tone he should strike — or maybe that’s just the character? His half-hearted parenting has left his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway, giving her usual 110%) exasperated and exhausted. She’s clearly overqualified for leadership, and looks likely to go full T-Rex on anything that tests her... or anyone. 

As the bewildered and eventually traumatized siblings Audrey and Brian, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery play a range of anxious notes, almost as worried about their parents’ marriage as they are about the monsters disemboweling their neighbors. Convery gets more attention as he goes rogue with a bow and arrows on the dangerous streets trying to find and rescue his dog Starbuck. (Yes, this is one of those “Humans are being slaughtered, but we’ve got to save the Dog!” crisis movies.)

But I spent much of the film’s running time wishing Mitchell would give Stella more to do. She was so fantastic in 2024’s wonderful coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass. Maybe she can be the focus of a sequel.

This one belongs to Hathaway. And it’s no contest. In this, the year of Anne Hathaway Overload — The Devil Wears Prada 2! Mother Mary! The Odyssey! And soon, Verity! — I’d give her an Oscar nomination for Oak Street, the silliest movie of the bunch.

If you’re hoping I’m here to enlighten you on Oak Street’s deep cinematic wisdom, well... I’ve got nothing. I’m sure I could strain out something about families that stick together through crisis, or the catharsis of a satisfying action movie that reflects the “What the hell? You have got to be kidding me!” quality of the world-changing nightmares that seem to be harming American communities on a daily basis in 2026. But I’m not sensing any desire in Mitchell to enlighten us. And that’s fine. Can we agree that a summertime ice cream sundae topped with gummy dinosaurs and fake-blood strawberry sauce is a good thing, regardless of the fact that it has little if any nutritional value? The End of Oak Street is a big, dumb, unpretentious good time. And while its resolution feels hilariously arbitrary and inexplicable, it avoids almost all of the mistakes that have spoiled every dino-rampage movie since Spielberg’s as-yet-unequalled OG. 

I don’t want to be one of those Gen Xers, but this nightmare on Oak Street made me nostalgic for the frivolous crowd-pleasers of my teen years, the ones that asked us to play along with one absurd idea without demanding an explanation. (See Back to the Future.) We really don’t make ’em like we used to. And this movie proves that adventure filmmakers really have forgotten some of the most essential fundamentals of mainstream entertainment. I hope Oak Street defies the industry standard, and that the almost inevitable sequel is even stronger than this one.

Note: This film was developed under the title Flowervale Street. Was that a thinly veiled cover for a Cloverdale sequel? It’s not hard to imagine that this started as a Cloverdale-franchise film and then was rewritten to stand alone with a family fighting dinosaurs instead of aliens. I’m probably wrong, but it makes me wonder.