My girlfriend has certain types of movies she really likes. She likes musical, especially musical biopics. She likes historical dramas. She likes Disney movies. She likes fantasy films and a lot of superhero fare. And she likes dinosaurs in movies. As far as actors go, there are a handful of actors she really likes, and one of them is Anne Hathaway, who has been having a productive year this year, with four movies out so far in 2026 and one more in the fall.
The End of Oak Street has both Hathaway and dinosaurs, so taking her to see that was a given.
The Platt family are living a fairly normal life in a 1982 Michigan suburb, though there are some problems between parents Denise (Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor). Denise is an aspiring novelist, trying to keep her work a secret from the rest of her family due to the subject matter. Greg delivers pizzas on the side for extra cash, something Denise isn’t happy about, and he may be secretly drinking on the side. Teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is an aspiring astronomer who idolizes Carl Sagan. Her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is worried about the beating he expects to get when the older brother of a kid whose arm he accidentally broke catches up to him, but his biggest thing is his undying love for the family dog Starbuck, a neighborhood menace according to neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrne). But then some odd things start showing up in the neighborhood, often after odd lights in the sky until, one night in the middle of a thunderstorm, the entire neighborhood is shifted back in time millions upon millions of years.
The problem from there becomes one of survival as dinosaurs are now roaming the neighborhood, eating the neighbors, the pets, and even the plants in people’s yards. From there, the Platts need to figure out what’s going on, find a possible way back, and survive as animals that they’ve never seen or encountered before, some harmless, many not, are running around and making meals of whatever they can sink their teeth into. Greg is optimistic. Denise is holding it all together as best they can. And they still have their marital problems. Can the family, or even the neighborhood itself, survive what long enough to get back to their own time?
I’m only really familiar with the work of writer/director David Robert Mitchell for the great horror movie It Follows, so for me, the best moments are when Mitchell is hinting about the dinosaurs. It takes some time before any of the Platts actually see a dinosaur, many of which, following currently scientific thought, have fur or feathers, and the audience has to wait a little longer. There are plenty of shots where a small thing might run by or a large tail might be seen hovering over a hedge or disappearing behind someone’s garage. The increasing damage to the neighborhood makes for a nice way of visual storytelling, even if many of those visual storytelling moments is a car that has clearly been stepped on by a large animal or a human corpse lying in the street–yeah, this body has a high body count, though the worst violence happens off-screen.
However, the movie largely only works but so-so. My girlfriend thought the family drama worked more than the dinosaurs because, as she put it, there seemed to be way too many of them running around. I actually felt the opposite. For both of us, we thought Hathaway and McGregor’s respective performances were rather mediocre. These are two actors capable of doing better, but they largely seem to be kinda flat, and I think that comes from Mitchell and his script. Neither of us hated the movie or anything, but we didn’t love it either. Mostly, I suspect this is producer J,J. Abrams’s next attempt to be the 21st century version of 1980s Spielberg, and for me, I’d say go try a Spielberg movie instead. I would have had more fun that way.
Grade: C
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