In The End of Oak Street, the writers and director ask, “What if your entire neighborhood was thrown back to a bygone era?” Well, that question doesn’t just apply to the characters in the movie. No, it’s a question for you, too. “What if your movie theater was thrown back to a bygone era?”

The End of Oak Street Review

The End of Oak Street has so many things you could want in a film, as well as so many things from a bygone era. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve, so you’ll never have to guess what movies The End of Oak Street is channeling. There’s a fine line between paying homage and being derivative, and David Robert Mitchell’s latest walks that line well.

But ultimately, it does what so few movies today are able to do: it is a good, competent film with dinosaurs in it. Since Jurassic Park, everyone’s been trying to make dinosaur movies, and most of them are not good. This one is, although it certainly fails to reach the heights of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster hit.

It works on a few levels. First, the set design is excellent. It feels ripped straight out of the 1980s that it’s so inspired by and enamored with, and the lush greenery of the Cretaceous parts of the landscape is beautiful. It features solid cinematography, but with the focus on a much smaller scale for most of the runtime, it’s the production design that truly pops.

And speaking of Spielberg, who is a wizard behind the lens, Mitchell’s work with the camera is quality. There is a one-take shot in the middle of the film right before a climactic moment that is jaw-dropping. Several shots are really strong, and there’s frequently excellent framing, too.

The movie struggles a bit on the script level, but there is still plenty to like there. The End of Oak Street is mean, to the point that it almost feels unfair to the characters. I am simultaneously turned off by the spitefulness and impressed that they had the gall to take it to some of those places. It does, however, wrap up on a positive note that I appreciated thematically, even if the route they took to get there was a little bit cheap.

The acting is solid all around, with Ewan McGregor doing quality work as usual. The End of Oak Street would not work, though, without Anne Hathaway. 2026 might as well be renamed the year of Hathaway, with five projects out or coming out:

• Verity (to be released)
• The End of Oak Street
• The Odyssey
• Mother Mary
• The Devil Wears Prada 2

She was even approached about a small role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. All of this to say that she has dominated the industry this year, and she dominates the screen here, which is totally unsurprising. She carries much of the film’s emotion, most of which is genuinely earned, and holds up well in the action sequences.

The End of Oak Street has big moments with huge, scary dinosaurs. Those scenes work really well, as the CGI dinosaurs are sufficiently menacing, and the character reactions to the creatures are adequately horrified. The carnage they wreak on Oak Street and the surrounding community is impressive.

The movie also has small, intimate moments, and those work just as well, if not better than the action scenes. Hathaway and McGregor trade blows emotionally for a good chunk of the first half, and it does a fantastic job of providing the non-survival stakes and creating the hurt the audience needs to feel.

The pacing is breakneck, which I suppose makes sense when your neighborhood is transported back to the Cretaceous Period. However, from a film perspective, it is a downside that so many of the emotional beats are shortly thereafter interrupted by the next dinosaur interaction. Slowing down in those scenes and overall would’ve benefited The End of Oak Street.

The mechanics of how this all works are briefly explained with a plausible scientific hypothesis, but truthfully, no one knows how this all happened. For 95% of the movie, it’s totally fine to ignore that and just experience what the characters are experiencing.

But once the movie does wrap up, it begins to unravel. It’s a thread that you know you just shouldn’t pull, but at the end of the movie, that thread is looking quite tantalizing. There are some plot conveniences that are best left ignored, if possible.

With The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day both out and truly throttling every other movie at the box office, I was pleasantly surprised that my smaller theater was pretty much packed to the brim with an intrigued and engaged audience. Someone genuinely screamed at a particularly shocking moment. But when there’s a good, original movie out, as 2026 has taught us on so many occasions, the people will show up, and that’s exactly what this is.

Score: 3.5/5