The End of Oak Street
It's 1982 and Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor) is complimented on his lovely family at a lively neighborhood block party. But Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is unhappy about a lot of things, including his reneging on their decision to keep their son Brian's (Christian Convery, 2025's "Frankenstein") dog Starbuck (Buzz and Brisket) at home that day and Greg's announcement that he's going to leave to make some deliveries when they'd agreed the party would be a family day. Brian and his older sister Audrey (Maisy Stella, "My Old Ass") are aware of the tension, but after episodes of a blinding white light, they'll all awake one day to outages and screams in the distance, eventually realizing their entire neighborhood has been transported back 200 million years in "The End of Oak Street."
Laura's Review: C+
According to press notes, writer/director David Robert Mitchell ("It Follows," "Under the Silver Lake") has always wanted to make a dinosaur movie, but what he's come up with is a movie that goes to ridiculous and illogical lengths to posit that we don't know what we are missing until it's gone. The film is entertaining in a summer popcorn movie kind of way with dinosaurs from several eras running rampant through the neighborhood and the cast, especially Hathaway, Stella and Convery, cannot be faulted, but in the end "The End of Oak Street" is just too far-fetched, its time travel element illogically handled.
Mitchell does a bang-up job introducing a typical American family in the early 80's. They live in a split level home with harvest yellow appliances and avocado cabinets and a neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne, "The Wolf of Wall Street"), who's constantly complaining about their dog (dog lovers will be kept on tenterhooks throughout and cat lovers are hereby warned). Every member of the Platt family is hiding something, though, beginning with the book Denise is writing in the basement with input from a neighbor, Mrs. Huddleston (Anne Gee Byrd, "Wild"), who once edited her husband's work and whose comments reveal Denise has been fantasizing about leaving her family. It will be Mrs. Huddleston who points out the first of Oak Street's oddities - a plant that has grown three feet high in her backyard in two days, one which looks like a pineapple but which librarian Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda, "RED") identifies from Denise's polaroid as something that went extinct 200 million years ago.
Oddly, Greg seems to spend a lot of time delivering pizza, then taking the lit up sign off of the top of his car so as not to embarrass Denise. We won't learn Aubrey's secret until well into the action, but Brian, who likes to spy on pretty 'new girl' Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis) with his buddies, is being bullied by a neighborhood kid intent on avenging his younger brother. After they experience a light flash so intense it affects the air pressure, they awaken the next day to their power still out and no running watter and begin to talk about just what's going on over bowls of cereal before the milk spoils. Then Denise and Greg decide to look around outside, Denise wanting to check on Mrs. Huddleston. What she finds is horrifying, but she gains a shotgun and after being chased by what look something like velociraptors they pile the kids in the car only to discover there is no way out. Audrey, a science geek, theorizes that the flashes were portals allowing things from the past to enter their world before lifting their world back in time entirely.
Starbuck will be the driving force of the action, the dog's disappearance weighing heavily on Brian, so when he sees his beloved pet barking outside their now boarded-up house, he breaks out to look for him, followed by Audrey. They'll elude many creatures, including a giant snake slithering out of a backyard pool, and also save Jeanette, terrified and alone. And Denise and Greg will follow to look for their kids, encountering bigger dinos which demolish the family car and a huge portal which disappears in front of their eyes before they eventually reunite with their kids in more ways than one.
Tonally, the film is a sometimes uneasy mix of comedy and tragedy, both occurring right after the Platts are reunited (the comedy bit is one of the film's highlights, good enough to get a callback in closing moments). There's a lot of Spielberg DNA in the dinosaur sequences, but this is Spielberg crossed with something like "Jumanji." Mitchell's cinematographer keeps things interesting by refocusing and panning to background scenes from the foreground and using extreme close-up profiles of family members in discussion with others. Certain story elements seem sloppy, like a T-Rex advancing on the group with no one sensing its enormous presence, Denise getting a lot of shots off without us seeing her reloading, or making a series of phone calls in the time it would take to make one. The film's time travel element doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
If you can accept varying sizes of bubbles as a means of time travel within a family drama, then maybe "The End of Oak Street" is for you, but despite some exciting sequences and solid performances, this one doesn't quite make it across the finish line.
Warner Brothers releases "The End of Oak Street" in theaters on 8/14/26.
