Film Review: The End of Oak Street 

The End of Oak Street
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Bad Robot, Jackson Pictures
In Theaters: 08.14.2025

The 80s nostalgia craze shows few signs of slowing down, and having two movies this week — The Brink of War and The End of Oak Street — that lean heavily into either a ‘’remember when…?” or “back in my day” approach to the decade of my formative years has made me feel like a dinosaur.

In The End of Oak Street, the Platt family lives a mundane suburban life on Oak Street. Denise (Anne Hathaway, The Devil Wears Prada, The Odyssey) is struggling to finish her novel while her husband, Frank (Ewan McGregor, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Moulin Rouge!) works multiple jobs — including delivering pizzas — to keep the family afloat. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella, My Old Ass) is preparing for college, while son Brian (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth, Cocaine Bear) is getting into trouble with other neighborhood boys. The normalcy of their suburban life is shattered when a mysterious cosmic event tears Oak Street from suburbia, transporting the entire neighborhood to a strange land inhabited by prehistoric creatures. Suddenly cut off from the world they know, the Platts and their neighbors must adapt to an increasingly dangerous environment as they try to understand what happened. As survival becomes their only priority, the fractured community must learn to work together — or face extinction.

The End of Oak Street plays like an episode of Steven Spielberg’s 80s anthology series Amazing Stories, crossed with a Jurassic World movie. While many are theorizing that because it’s produced by J.J. Abrams, this is a new entry in the Cloverfield franchise, it feels more spiritually related to the Spielberg homage of Super 8. It’s got much more of a coherent story than most of those films. Dinophiles who have been itching to see prehistoric animals that look more like modern discoveries suggest they will geek out to velociraptors that literally are birds of prey, and the movie is solid fun. While there’s a fair amount of comic relief, it’s also intense and at times rather grim, and if you were hooked by the first trailer — set to Billy Joel’s “My Life” — you may be surprised by just how dark this gets at times, with a body count that recalls the original Jurassic Park novel more so than the movie. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) has crafted an audacious blend of suburban family drama, science fiction and prehistoric adventure that takes its improbable premise seriously enough to keep us engaged. As silly as the movie is, Mitchell’s clever script does a remarkable job of setting up plausible scenarios and covering potential plot holes, making for either the smartest dumb movie of the summer or the dumbest smart movie.

The cast is strong all around, but the clear standout is Hathaway, who has had a phenomenal year. Denise is the embodiment of the sad and unfilled housewife who feels life being sucked out of her in suburbia, and Hathaway brings angst and gravitas to the role. Denise is also a formidable and cool-headed action heroine, and it’s a terrific vehicle for Hathaway the movie star. McGregor is quite likable as Frank, even if his American accent hasn’t gotten much better over the best 20-something years in Hollywood. Stella and Convery are both strong, and the biggest strength of The End of Oak Street is that we genuinely like and care about this family, which makes it far more tense than the average horror outing. 

The End of Oak Street is definitely not for young kids. My 10-year-old nephew has seen Jurassic Park on the big screen, but I wouldn’t take him to this one. It should play well to 13 and up. It’s a sleek and creative B-movie thriller that makes for an enjoyable diversion, and as quite possibly the summer’s last blockbuster, it succeeds well enough at what it’s trying to do to earn a solid recommendation. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Film Review: The Brink of War
Film Review: Ice Cream Man

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