Many devotees of film have put in their two cents on the current state of cinema. Piss-poor theater etiquette. The abysmal dip (and apparent resurgence) of cinema attendance. The war being waged between powerhouse Hollywood IP and underdog stories that come out of nowhere to conquer the box office. Like I said, much discussion by hundreds of journalists that are much more eloquent than myself. What does this have to do with the dinosaur popcorn feature, The End of Oak Street?
Director and screenwriter David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) set forth a singular goal for his dinosaur adventure: to make the kind of film he remembers watching with his father while growing up. It’s a target that Mitchell hits perfectly, with The End of Oak Street paying subtle homage to and evoking the essence of popular nostalgic titles like The Goonies, Back to the Future, The Land Before Time, and (of course) Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street does not approach its outlandish premise with surgical detail to world-building, nor does it endeavor to take itself too seriously. It simply asks for viewers to kick back and enjoy the ride. Things just might be looking up…
Which is precisely why - despite its many imperfections - I would insist that The End of Oak Street be enjoyed in theaters, with the largest popcorn imaginable. It is a film that understands the pleasure of the popcorn feature and delivers entertainment calibrated to a tried-and-true formula, while still delivering a certain brutality and shock factor that are credits to Mitchell’s horror instincts.
The End of Oak Street finds the Pratt family living out their normal lives, in their quiet cul-de-sac, in their typical all-American neighborhood. Our patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) works odd jobs to care for his family and parents with a feel-good blend of optimism and dad jokes. Meanwhile, wife and mother Denise (Anne Hathaway) clacks away in the basement at a secret novel manuscript and pines for an escape from Oak Street. The family is completed by daughter Audrey (Maisy Strella), little brother Brian (Christian Convery), and family dog/lovable rascal, Starbuck.
Overnight, in a flash of inexplicable light, the Pratts’ entire neighborhood is swapped through space and time with a stretch of prehistoric jungle. The family and their neighbors wake up to no power, no water, and no way home — with hungry dinosaurs swarming the streets.
The greatest strength of The End of Oak Street is its narrowed focus. A single family’s fight to survive 48-hours in Jurassic Hell. There’s a sort of bleak, pessimistic realism to the Pratt family’s brand of “rugged individualism.” Mitchell doesn’t indulge the impulse to turn The End of Oak Street into a “let’s band all the neighbors together”, organized campaign for survival. Instead, audiences are treated to something raw, messy, disorganize, and incredibly authentic. The Pratt family is unprepared and on their own.
In this way, The End of Oak Street forces simmering family dramas out into the open out of pure necessity, and the result is family therapy of the most brutal kind. It’s a surprising emotional core to what can easily pass as just a dinosaur romp.
Expansive world-building is beyond the scope and intent of the film. At no point does Mitchell pause the action to reveal some mystery of the universe or unearth a conveniently placed astrophysicist neighbor that can explain the “why” of it. The audience knows exactly as much as the Pratts: very little and hinging a great deal of faith on a hunch and a hope. While this may be frustrating for some viewers, I don’t consider it a weakness. This grounds The End of Oak Street as a story about the survival family — one that’s facing inner turmoil as well as hungry carnivores.
The End of Oak Street feels like a trip back in time to beloved family adventures of days past. Instead of simply donning the trappings of 80s and 90s nostalgia, The End of Oak Street embodies the balance of audacity and sincerity that takes audiences right back to that Amblin-esque feeling. Just superb.
Rating: 7.5/10
The End of Oak Street arrives in theaters and IMAX on August 14, 2026.
Cait is a film critic, freelance entertainment journalist, and pop culture essayist based in Austin, Texas. She is a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic and voting member of the Online Association for Female Film Critics and Women Film Critics Circle.
Her work has appeared in Daily Dead, Paste Magazine, The Mary Sue, Polygon, But Why Tho?, Film Inquiry, and many other spots on the cinephile’s internet!
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