Jonah Naplan   August 14, 2026

David Robert Mitchell is fascinated by horrors unfolding within the walls of idyllic suburbia. If his STI metaphors in the breakout hit “It Follows” painted a stylish picture about how our relationship traumas follow us into our homes, then his newest movie “The End of Oak Street” is about how unresolved family turmoil pushes us back onto the streets.

Starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as Greg and Denise Platt, parents attempting to reconcile over their different worldviews, this final squeeze from the summer blockbuster season is more mature than most of the offerings this year in that the characters facing the danger feel like real people. Set in 1982 Michigan, writer/director Mitchell creates a charmingly retro atmosphere that’s not any less believable than the ones characters inhabited in “The Goonies,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” or “Back to the Future.” Bullies chase kids around on bicycles, boys crouch behind picket fences to admire the pretty new girl on the block, and Dad’s a pizza delivery driver who brings home whole boxes for dinner. You can feel the blazing heat of the summer sun and the familiar warmth of family dynamics all throughout the first 20 minutes. It’s predictable, and comfortable that way.

“The End of Oak Street” focuses on one such nuclear family. The Platts, with daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), son Brian (Christian Convery), and a dog named Starbuck, initially appear to be a thriving group of idealized suburban archetypes. That is, until we learn more about them. Dad is struggling with what to do with his career, picking up menial jobs he’s way overqualified for, and Mom is unsatisfied being a housewife and yearns to be an author, spending her free time typing away in the basement, while the kids have social issues of their own. There’s lots of tension about how their life ought to be. Then the dinosaurs show up.

In the middle of the night, the Platts’ street gets picked up wholesale and seemingly transported back in time 80 million years ago to the Cretaceous period in a spectacle of bright lights and sound straight out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Soon, the family must leave their grievances at the door as they’re faced with the fiercest dinosaurs to ever roam the Earth, including the feathered Allosaurus, the toothy Tropeognathus, and a giant snake known as the Titanoboa. The rest is simple—they must fight to survive while running around the neighborhood, trying to find a way back to their time. 

“Simple” is not immediately synonymous with “predictable,” though, and the twists this movie takes will surprise you, and are best experienced in a packed theater where you can feel the whole audience collectively gasp at key moments in the action. “The End of Oak Street” has a blast poking and prodding at the PG-13 rating to see how far it can be pushed, all the way through its questionably dark conclusion that leaves more questions than answers. The result is a movie with enough of a gory edge that one can imagine it having the same cultural impact as “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Gremlins” if it indeed had come out in 1982.

It’s SO Spielbergian in so many ways, perhaps even more so than the director’s actual new movie this summer, “Disclosure Day” (for viewers with wide-ranging tastes, it’s also one of two movies featuring dinosaurs to come out this weekend, the other being “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie”). Everything, from the wonderfully orchestral score by Michael Giacchino, to the streams of light that pour in from outside in the nighttime, to the genuinely mysterious aura that surrounds the whole thing, feels warped in from another era, the kind of film that might have traumatized kids in the 80s for a week or so, but then, with time, would make them more interested in exploring the medium. Speaking of Spielberg, it’s also maybe the first dinosaur movie since his original “Jurassic Park” to truly find that happy medium between suspense and fun, as characters fend off vicious creatures with names that might be hard to spell, but dangers that are impossible to overlook.

The movie is so well-paced for so long that its frequent pit stops to reckon with the family drama feel out-of-place, slowing down the ride when it should be speeding up. Mitchell’s script struggles to characterize the conflict between Greg and Denise beyond anything more than one-note dialogue exchanges that get over-acted to oblivion in order to match the elevated histrionics of the dinosaur action. And the movie’s interest in exploring the importance of unity in the face of danger gets lost once it attempts to tie up all the loose ends of the plot. Of course, McGregor and Hathaway are working at the height of their abilities to make the dynamic work, with Hathaway continuing on her streak of making 2026 her biggest, most versatile year yet, and McGregor playing to the “cool and collected father” trope, even if he sadly doesn’t get a whole lot to do.

Still, for a movie largely focusing on just four characters that runs at a slick 100 minutes and is entertaining from beginning to end, it’s a more than welcome diversion and the perfect way to get out of the heat for a weekend afternoon. Mitchell has undeniably found his niche, telling stories about crises unfolding in the very places we go to for safety. Though his previous movies had more to say, “The End of Oak Street” is still brilliant fun, produced so well that it feels real. Leaving the theater, you might even feel inclined to look up rather than straight ahead, as if a pterodactyl could come swooping down from above.

Now playing in theaters.