For over three decades, the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise has had a chokehold on dinosaur movies; providing the look, the feel, the rhythm to how they should be done successfully. We’ve had other stabs at action flicks with the prehistoric beasties before (I’m thinking Adam Driver’s 65), but none have quite sunk their teeth into the summer fun of the franchise Steven Spielberg built.
Well, guess what? End of Oak Street finally does the trick, giving us a rousing blast of popcorn fun at the end of the season, a perfect audience movie that will leave you screaming and laughing, and a worthy successor to the Jurassic movies that does not feel like a carbon copy, but instead its own nastily hilarious family adventure with some real shocking twists… And of course, it comes from producer J.J. Abrams, who has been trying his whole career to reproduce that old Spielberg magic.
Actually, that’s not totally fair, though End of Oak Street would work great on a double feature with the underrated Abrams flick Super 8. Instead, credit here to writer and director David Robert Mitchell, who follows up the horror sensation It Follows and mixed reception to Under the Silver Lake with what is a relatively straightforward, yet eminently propulsive 99-minute family flick meets dinosaur slasher feature featuring excellent central performances by Anne Hathaway (on a heater this year with Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey), Ewan McGregor, Christian Convery and Maisy Stella.
The movie kicks off in a delightfully retro 1982 with a block party on the titular street. There, we meet the Platt family, who all have their own simple little problems. Audrey (Stella, so good in My Old Ass, and great here too) desperately wants to go to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan*. Brian (Convery, who has grown up a lot from Netflix’s Sweet Tooth) is trying not to get beat up by one of the neighborhood bullies. But both kids are wrestling with their biggest problem, that it sure seems like their parents are going to get divorced.
(*As a Cornell University graduate myself, I appreciate the rare movie that features Cornell not as a sign that the character is a dweeb or a villain, but actually smart. THANK YOU.)
In that, most of the drama and thematic threads are tied to Denise (Hathaway) and Greg (McGregor). The latter is ignoring his family to pick up some extra money delivering pizzas, and drinking on the sly (guess why). Meanwhile, the former is writing a thinly veiled novel about a character who has their bags packed and desperately wants to escape their family for a life in the big city. So what happens? Their neighborhood gets sent back in time millions of years and the family is forced to survive when they’re plunked in the middle of a jungle full of dinosaurs so hungry they would make hippos be like “whoa, slow down, dudes.”
In short: Denise wants to escape, and she’s thrust into a situation where she is both trapped and literally has to figure out how to escape. The family is being torn apart, and then there are dinosaurs who want to tear them apart. Will Denise grow to understand she doesn’t have to give up her family to find her own strength? Will Greg step up to protect his family in the right way, instead of ignoring his problems with false positivity? All of these plot points and more, including a missing dog named Starbuck, will be settled thanks to the high stress situation. And also, you get to watch everyone from neighbors to cats ripped apart horrifically by the dinos!
What’s actually shocking about End of Oak Street is that after the initial setup, the movie does not slow down for a second, throwing wild, off the wall swings out that had the audience of should-be-jaded critics I saw it with (and invited audience members) absolutely howling at the screen. The movie, it should be noted, is in on the joke, from absolutely brutal dinosaur kills to one relationship twist that will likely launch a million memes. It’s a crowd pleaser in the best sense of the words, the sort of experience that’s made for a movie theater in the dead of the summer.
But it’s also much, much better than that. While the plot itself is essentially a Twilight Zone episode crossed with Jurassic Park on steroids, Mitchell gives plenty of time for his stellar cast to actually feel the weight of what’s happening to them. When you’ve got McGregor and Hathaway in the cast, two absolute pros, you’re gonna want to let them emote their hearts out – particularly Hathaway, who starts broad but ends up with a surprisingly lived in and realistic performance of motherhood that doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of parenting. McGregor doesn’t quite reach that level, but he does get to play to his best absolute dork instincts, eliciting some of the biggest laughs in the movie.
Convery and Stella are wonderful as well, two perfectly cast Spielbergian child actors (ish, Stella is 22) who channel all the wonder and horror that’s needed. One of the best scenes in the movie simply finds Stella taking a moment to sing to a song in a car. No dinosaurs, no jump scares, just a teen reacting to the situation the exact way a teen would react to this impossible situation. And while the rest of the scant supporting cast is solid as well, PJ Byrne is particularly hilarious as always as the Platt family’s extremely annoying neighbor.
Beyond the human cast, the real stars are – of course – the dinosaurs. And in that, End of Oak Street gives us a great, groddy creature feature as well that far from hits the same beats or classic dino looks we’d expect on screen. I’ll fully admit I’m not up on my paleontology enough to know if the dinosaurs in the movie are what we believe the reptiles looked like, now, in 2026, or whether this is what we thought in 1982 (a quick look at an encyclopedia in the movie convinced me it’s the latter). But wherever the designs came from, they look closer to alien creatures than the big lizards we expect. Raptors have long snouts and feathers. Some sort of ancient tortoise looks like a creature out of Avatar: The Last Airbender. And there’s a section with an enormous, pale-white snake that is skin-crawling.
Mitchell films this all with a spring in his step, and an intriguing (though perhaps overused) split-focus diopter that looks odd in dialogue scenes, but pays off nicely elsewhere. And he’s aided by Michael Giacchino, maybe the best suited score writer for this sort of film in the business today, the true heir to John Williams.
Look, not to go all “we used to be a proper country” but as we enter the five-thousandth cycle of discussion about the dying (or not) theatrical experience, I’ve been thinking a lot about how back in the ‘80s and ‘90s part of the reason we went to see movies was because they had air conditioning and snacks. And those movies, a lot of the time, were designed to have fun while staying cool, chowing on popcorn, and screaming and laughing with a crowd of other people aiming to escape the heat. End of Oak Street perfectly channels that experience, with the bonus of great directing, expert acting, some stellar special effects, and a cleverly constructed sci-fi plot. It’s not necessarily that it was better back in the day, but the pressure to deliver the next big blockbuster or set up a franchise is not present in End of Oak Street, just like when those old films were simply aiming to deliver thrills and chills. Sure, things do get left open for a sequel if they want to go that route. But as is, it’s exactly what you want out of a summer movie: big, bold, funny, and just the best time at the movies. Hold on to your butts.
End of Oak Street is in theaters on August 14, 2026.
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