Triumphant End of Oak Street Roars to Life with Prehistoric Gusto
The best popcorn film of the summer is writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s wildly entertaining Spielbergian throwback The End of Oak Street. Like some surreal, creative melding of a 1960s episode of The Outer Limits with Jurassic Park, with a healthy dose of Poltergeist and Gremlins thrown in for good measure, this wickedly shrewd sci-fi slice of creature-feature terror is a crowd-pleasing adrenaline blast.
Mitchell isn’t afraid to mix melodramatic cheese with authentic, character-driven thrills and chills with confident aplomb, all while displaying a malevolent mean streak that gives his film genuine life-or-death stakes. While there’s a healthy dose of nostalgia for those 1980s summertime hits that changed moviegoing forever, this isn’t some retro pastiche of days gone by. Mitchell crafts a fascinating scenario and creates three-dimensional characters worth caring about. Better, he remembers to make the dinosaurs genuinely scary, which, after the last two Jurassic World installments, is no easy feat.
In a small 1980s suburban neighborhood, the unthinkable has happened. A multiblock circular radius of the community has been transported some 65-million-years. Their homes no longer have power. Phones do not work. No one is coming to help any of the residents living there. Topping it off, dinosaurs run amok, and every predator rampaging through the streets is eager to make a bloody meal out of any human they happen to encounter.
At the center of this carnage is the Platt family: mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), father Greg (Ewan McGregor), daughter Aubrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and their energetic dog Starbuck. Suddenly, their worries about being beaten up by the neighborhood bully, not having the money to attend the college of their dreams, or thoughts that a once strong marriage might be hurtling toward divorce become instantaneously insignificant. Now survival is the only thing on all of their minds. That, and trying to figure out what has happened to them. More significantly, they’re determined to try and find a way back, back to the future, that is.
Mitchell’s thriller runs a lean 99 minutes. That doesn’t mean the director doesn’t give his feature room to breathe, especially early on. He leans fully into the sublime John Williams-esque score from veteran composer Michael Giacchino (Spider-Man: Brand New Day) and revels in the sumptuous production design courtesy of Maya Shimoguchi (Werewolf by Night). The director gifts cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (The Piano Lesson) the freedom to let his camera rove about the neighborhood with kinetic grace, making the geography for all the madness and mayhem to come nicely predefined. Special shoutout to costume designer Erin Benach (Roofman) as well, as I’m embarrassed to admit I personally owned at least two pairs of shorts and four different shirts worn by various characters back when I was in elementary school.
Mitchell also isn’t afraid of quiet. The opening act that sets everything up is sublime. Denise spending time with her beloved book editor neighbor, Greg trying to mumble through excuses as to why he needs to work a pizza delivery side job seemingly every night, Brian tooling around the block on his BMX with his small group of friends hiding behind a rickety wooden fence to spy on the new neighborhood girl (Jordan Alexa Davis); it all works beautifully. Later, after madness has cruelly descended upon them all, simple scenes of Aubrey stealing a moment to hide in the family station wagon to sing along to Steve Windwood hit like an anvil to the gut. The same goes for a simple look of grief at a flooded basement and a dream likely forever lost by a distraught mother who has to quickly recompose herself before her terrified children notice and ask what’s wrong.
Hathaway anchors things with her fourth terrific star-turn of 2026 (and she still has one more, Verity, scheduled to arrive in October). She channels her inner Teri Garr (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial) as she gives Denise complex, vibrantly multidimensional life, grabbing dashes from the likes of Frances Lee McCain (Gremlins) and Barbara Bosson (The Last Starfighter) for good measure. But this isn’t some performance built on nothing more than 1980s appropriation. Hathaway brings an inner life and a stalwart physicality to the proceedings, all of which helps make Denise’s continued heroics all the more triumphant.
Considering he made the magnificent It Follows, it’s not altogether shocking that Mitchell is better at staging pulse-pounding scenes of tension, suspense, and terror than he is at orchestrating memorable action sequences. The good news is that this helps make the dinosaurs increasingly terrifying, while the bad is that the energy levels during some of the more ambitious set pieces can noticeably fluctuate. But this is a minor issue, as otherwise the balance between overt melodrama, science-based intrigue, familial strife, and (prehistoric) animal attack antics is marvelously maintained from first scene to last. The End of Oak Street isn’t just one of the year’s biggest and brightest surprises; it’s also one of 2026’s best films.
– Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: 3½ (out of 4)
