'The End of Oak Street' Review: Summer Trash That Works
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- "The End of Oak Street" is a suburban dinosaur thriller set in 1982 Flowervale, where Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play parents Denise and Greg Platt defending their cul-de-sac against raptors, stegosauruses, and a T. rex.
- Director David Robert Mitchell ("It Follows," "Under the Silver Lake") frames the film as a deliberate return from "movie jail" after the 2018 flop "Under the Silver Lake," layering in Spielbergian references including a Greg-running-beside-a-fence shot, period pop cues like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Turning Japanese," and a Gremlin pizza-delivery gag.
- The plot's "entirely ludicrous" explanation — a time-warp wormhole drops the Platts into a two-mile-wide preserved prehistoric pocket of suburbia — is described as the kind of half-baked premise an executive might green-light on pain of being replaced by AI.
- Hathaway and McGregor play a marriage "edging into separation terrain," with the review calling their tandem overacting "vivid and likable" and noting that "sometimes a T. rex attack can be the best couples' therapy."
- Mitchell stages the creature attacks with "witty timing and skill" — a T. rex on the porch, two feathery brontosauruses humping against a house, and a Polaroid gag from Hathaway — producing scares the reviewer calls more effective than recent "Jurassic" sequels.
- The review slots the film into a self-aware "last-gasp-of-summer movie" genre — trashy, shameless, a "glorified thunder-lizard knockoff" released just before the season ends — letting the blockbuster summer close "with a gasp instead of a whimper."
Why it matters: For David Robert Mitchell, the film is a calculated commercial pivot back to genre work after the 2018 indie flop "Under the Silver Lake" sent him to what the review calls "movie jail" — and reviewers from Deadline ("Rip-Roaring") to IndieWire ("Biggest Surprise of the Summer," "Best Dinosaur Movie Since 1993") to Rolling Stone ("Best Vintage-Spielberg Rip-Off of the Past Decade") are rewarding the pander with the warmest notices of his career.
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