It seems that we will never escape from 80s nostalgia. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; I was a kid in the 80s, and there are lots of great memories to be had of that time period if you were of a certain age. The problem I generally have with throwback films is that the focus becomes more on the time period and the nostalgia trip than the actual story or the people taking part in it. The same can be said for the “kids on bikes” trope (which also seems to take place in the 80s)—it feels more about the quirky characters than what’s going on around them. All that being said to get to the point that The End of Oak Street sits exactly at the intersection of those two streets and could easily have fallen prey to the pitfalls that each brings. What I’m delighted to say is that it avoids falling victim to its own tropes and sets up a wonderfully engaging, and at times hair-raising, adventure that deserves more than just to be left out to die in the doldrums of August.
Things aren’t going well for the Platt family. Aspiring author Denise (Anne Hathaway) and out-of-work dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) are on the verge of getting a divorce and are poorly attempting to hide it from their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). As tensions mount in the house, and the teenagers begin to act out, a strange light fills the sky during a storm and suddenly the whole neighborhood finds itself lost in a primordial world where dinosaurs still roam the earth. Forced to work with each other for survival, the Platts search for clues as to how they got into this predicament, if they can get home, and do their best not to get eaten by the creatures that are now at the top of the food chain.
It’s extremely rare that I go into a film completely blind, but that’s what happened with Oak Street. All I knew was that it had something to do with a dinosaur because that’s what I saw on a poster. If you get the chance to experience it like this, I highly recommend it because it was much more enjoyable figuring it out as I went without having any preconceived notions.
Oak Street proves that you can take a very simple idea and evolve it into something wonderful using only the basic building blocks of filmmaking. Is there anything really all that exceptional here? No. Special effects are pretty average, the acting—while all from fantastic actors—is just okay (with Anne Hathaway as the standout, continuing her 2026 run of great performances), and the story itself is about as barebones and derivative as they come. But here’s what this film does that so many others try and fail at: it knows what it is and leans heavily into its B-movie roots and the fun it wants you to have.
It knows humans fighting dinosaurs is silly. It gets that we’re rooting for the jerk to get his (or her) comeuppance for being mean to the kids by getting torn apart by the monsters. It wants us to laugh or jump in fright together as one audience in the right moments, and it succeeds wildly at that because the film embraces its own fun as much as we do watching it. I honestly wish more movies would do this because not everything can (or should) be Citizen Kane. We’re allowed to have absurd or weird ones out there that exist just to let us have fun.
The End of Oak Street is my biggest surprise of the year, and while that’s partly due to having no idea what I was getting into, it’s also because I just didn’t expect to enjoy it this much. Great cast aside, anything getting released in August and September is generally suspect because it usually means the studio lacked faith in it and needed to dump it. That’s a shame here, as it risks getting lost in the shuffle alongside blockbusters like Spider-Man and The Odyssey. But if you’ve already checked those off your list, definitely go see this. It leans into a solid, hard PG-13 with its violence—so maybe leave the youngest ones at home—but older kids will handle it fine. It’s also refreshingly short, clocking in under two hours. You’re essentially getting one of the best Jurassic Park movies we never got, and that alone is worth the price of admission.
★★★☆
