The End of Oak Street Review

In 1982, the Platts seem like your typical happy suburban family. But under the surface, they’re all dealing with their own personal struggles. Greg has lost his job and is trying to make money delivering pizzas. Denise is deeply frustrated with Greg and ready to end their marriage.

Maisy is trying to get into college and decide her future career path. Christian is dealing with the neighborhood bully. And family dog Starbuck is trying to get into the neighbor’s backyard.

But all of their various issues become insignificant when the unexpected happens. Amid a mysterious anomaly in space, the neighborhood is transported through time. 200 million years into the past, to be specific.

The Platts and all their neighbors awaken to discover dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. They soon discover they have nowhere to run as they are trapped in the prehistoric world. Thus begins a struggle for survival that will either destroy the family or make them stronger than ever.

If there’s a dinosaur movie in theaters, I’m there for it (with the exception of PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, I suppose). So I was very much up for The End of Oak Street. While it wasn’t everything I hoped it would be and the trailers show most of the highlights, there were still some great moments.

On the dinosaur front, we get to see several species we haven’t necessarily seen before. While the Jurassic Park movies could pick and choose various cool species from the past, The End of Oak Street had to pick one snapshot in time and use only the dinosaurs from that era. I won’t name them all here, but it gave a good variety of weird threats to our unsuspecting suburbanites.

They also went for the feathered versions of the dinosaurs, which made them more scientifically accurate but, in some cases, made it feel like our heroes were battling large birds rather than dinosaurs. Still, if you’re a dinosaur aficionado, there’s plenty to make you happy here.

The End of Oak Street runs solidly on nostalgia for Amblin films, and it’s clear writer and director David Robert Mitchell was using their playbook. You have an ordinary family thrown into an extraordinary situation. There are kids on bikes, 1982-themed sets, and period-specific props. It feels Amblin-y appropriately.

The End of Oak Street also has a tight running time of 99 minutes. That felt just right. It didn’t overstay its welcome, but it had enough time to tell the story.

This film is a series of strange choices by David Robert Mitchell. The first odd choice is the tone. One moment it is very lighthearted and comedic, a feeling accentuated by the quirky score by Michael Giacchino. It almost feels like a children’s movie at some points.

But then it has incredibly dark scenes where people are killed by dinosaurs in horrible ways. People have their heads bitten off, pterodactyls pick at corpses, and children scream in panic as they find themselves orphaned in the prehistoric era. Throw in adult themes of divorce, alcoholism, and more, and you see this headed into the realm of an R-rated film.

This strange mix in tone means the story never really finds its feet. It either needed to go full Jumanji and lean into the comedy or go fully R-rated in dinosaur mayhem. At our screening, when a major character was brutally killed, the audience started laughing. Rather than being a somber, dark moment, the audience thought it was comedic and started laughing, I think, in part due to the confusion in tone. Or they were idiots.

There were other strange choices. In one scene, a dinosaur is randomly seen pooping. Why? In another scene, Brian wets his pants during a dinosaur attack. Why humiliate the character? In another scene, a subplot of Audrey being a lesbian is introduced out of nowhere at a time so inappropriate to the story that you must wonder why it was added.

Matters aren’t helped by all of the Platts being basically unlikable characters. Ewan McGregor as Greg Platt is kind of a naïve mess. Anne Hathaway as Denise Platt constantly complains. Maisy Stella, as Audrey Platt, seems more interested in her lesbian awakening than in running from dinosaurs.

And Christian Convery as Brian Platt is a bit of a coward who couldn’t hit a diplodocus with an arrow if it was 1 ft in front of him. The only likable member of the family is Starbuck the dog, and even he manages to get plenty of people killed.

When The End of Oak Street is over, you start replaying the story in your mind and realize how many paradoxes the ending created and how many unresolved subplots there were. I won’t get into spoilers, but you start thinking. “Well, what happened to this character? And that character? And that other character?” Suddenly, the nice, neat Amblin-y ending unintentionally becomes very dark for a lot of characters, yet it is all glossed over and forgotten.

To sum it up, if you like seeing dinosaurs eat people, then The End of Oak Street is worth seeing on the big screen. But be prepared to turn off your brain while watching it.

THE END OF OAK STREET REVIEW RATING: 6 OUT OF 10

Warner Bros. Pictures will release The End of Oak Street in theaters on Friday, August 14, 2026. The film is rated PG-13 for some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, and suggestive material.