The End of Oak Street

End of Oak Street released August 14, 2026, a sci-fi adventure about a suburban neighborhood yanked back through time into the age of dinosaurs. Reviews reached for comparisons to Jurassic Park, The Goonies, even The Twilight Zone. The real question is whether it earns those comparisons or just borrows their surface for a similar emotional hit.

It’s 1982. The Platt family attends a summer block party, and the veneer of a perfect nuclear household cracks fast. Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are in a rough patch, squeezed by money problems; Greg promised to spend the day with the family and bails to deliver pizzas for extra income. The kids feel the ripples: son Brian (Christian Convery) has been acting out, and daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is watching her education prospects shrink under the same financial strain. There’s also a dog named Starbuck, who terrorizes the neighbor and has an oddly specific name for a family pet.

That night Brian spots a strange flashing light. Odd anomalies pile up, and during a storm the lights return along with a general sense of wrongness. The rain stops, the power dies, a scream echoes outside. By morning something is clearly off. Greg and Denise go looking for Starbuck and discover not only dangerous dinosaurs roaming the streets, but that the neighborhood itself has been thrown back into the past. Now the family has to survive the roaming predators and find a way home.

This is a movie I want to like more than I actually do. There are things here I loved, and things I really did not, and the longer I sit with it, the worse it ages, like a fast food meal that tastes fine in the moment and sits wrong an hour later. Setups fizzle. Execution choices could have landed better. The ending raises more questions than it answers. Getting into the real problems means spoilers, so first, what works, spoiler-free.

On a filmmaking level, this genuinely tries to be different. Camerawork gets playful, and while not every choice lands, more works than doesn’t. Family members run in the background while neighbors occupy the foreground. Character heads get pushed to one edge of frame during conversations in a way that reads odd and works because of that oddness. One shot zooms in on a reflection in a window with a tense stinger cue for a reveal that would have hit harder played quieter, letting the audience clock the danger without being told to feel scared. The build to the dinosaur reveal is genuinely well constructed. The first half of this movie is strong.

The score leans hard into Spielberg E.T. territory, part of that broader emotional mimicry, but it fits, especially early. This is a film that benefits from a theater: scenes where chaos rages outside while the camera stays locked on the family land harder with real surround sound behind them.

Performances are solid. Hathaway and McGregor work well as a strained marriage getting shoved into a nightmare. Writing choices around their characters bother me more than the acting does, which we’ll get to. The kids are fine, with one exception covered below.

And the dinosaurs themselves: used sparingly, and I wanted a couple more scenes with them, but what’s there works. Feathered, furrier designs that lean into more current paleontology. A few convenience beats show up, dinosaurs conveniently blocking a staircase, nobody hearing flyers overhead until they’re right there, a charging Allosaurus nobody notices mid-conversation, but I mostly let those slide. My favorite movie as a kid was Jurassic Park III, largely because of the Spinosaurus snapping the T-Rex’s neck, an all-time peak-cinema moment for young me. Watching this, I got flashes of that same feeling and genuinely hoped it would hold Jurassic Park‘s tone the whole way through: family-friendly, a little scary, but with the cool factor of dinosaurs dulling the fear. It gets close. A couple of modern additions keep it from actually landing there.

Spoilers from here.

There’s a dinosaur mating scene. Completely unnecessary, and it single-handedly shifts this from a movie you could show an eight-to-ten-year-old to one you now hold off a few more years on. Not a quick cutaway either: Denise has Greg pose for a photo in front of it. Some will call that overblown. It wasn’t needed. Adult humor can work in a movie like this; The Goonies did it better decades ago with the anatomically correct statue gag, a quick, mostly-over-kids’-heads joke about anatomy that never fully tips into anything explicit. Kids generally know there’s a difference between boys and girls from basic bathroom logic; they don’t need the birds-and-the-bees context this scene assumes. Showing the act itself, dinosaurs or not, pushes this out of family-movie territory it otherwise earns. This isn’t prudishness. Intimacy has a place in narratives built for a more mature audience. Nothing before this scene signals that this is that kind of movie. It’s a family-survives-dinosaurs story that could have been the perfect all-ages watch, and the lingering shot instead of a quick cutaway makes it worse.

The kids’ performances land as merely alright, mostly because the writing gives them little to actually do. Brian is set up as a kid acting out, supposedly breaking another kid’s arm on purpose, with that kid’s brother now hunting him for revenge. Greg confronts him about smelling like smoke after getting back from deliveries. None of that “acting out” actually plays out on screen beyond one impulsive attempt to rescue Starbuck, which reads as a boy loving his dog, not a troubled kid. The one scene where the brother actually attacks Brian just fizzles: the injured brother pulls him off, they get confused about what actually happened, and everyone walks away. Nothing pays off. Audrey is set up as the smart sister and gets exactly one moment to use it, piecing together the mechanics of the time jump, then nothing further. The third kid the family picks up, Jeanette, plays like a cardboard cutout, stone-faced in a way that reads as bad acting rather than shock.

Then there’s Greg. The film frames him as something of a loser: unstable work, embarrassing pizza deliveries, leaning on drinking. Once the family is stranded, the movie seems to want us to see his optimism as a flaw, and I disagree entirely. After fortifying the house, he stays hopeful, insisting they’ll survive and get home, invoking faith that God won’t let them die, which Denise and Audrey push back on sharper than the moment calls for. Another beat has Audrey and Jeanette flatly stating they don’t believe in God, which feels tonally off for the scene. Denise later confronts him about his optimism, and it spirals into a fight about his job, her book, their communication. Forced. My issue: Greg being optimistic wasn’t the wrong call. Protecting your kids means making them feel safe, not “well, kids, we’re probably going to die.” I disagree with some of his tactical choices, they should have pushed out for supplies sooner, but everything he does traces back to protecting his family, including trying to send Denise through the first portal alone to guarantee her survival. The film wants him to be wrong and never actually makes the case.

Denise and Greg reconcile right before his death scene, clearly meant to set up a heroic sacrifice, and even that gets fumbled. Fleeing an Allosaurus, Greg gets eaten. In the moment, it’s the exact “of course they kill the dad” gut-punch you expect, and the film partially walks it back later through time-travel mechanics that save him and other residents, landing on an upbeat ending I actually did not mind, questions aside. The scene itself plays badly, though. Denise gets pinned on a porch; Greg charges in with a sledgehammer, connects with the Allosaurus’s head, briefly stunning it, then runs to her and just holds her hand at the railing instead of climbing to help, giving the dinosaur time to eat his leg and then him while Denise and the kids watch and slowly walk off. A more heroic death was right there and skipped. The pacing of the kill itself feels wrong too: an Allosaurus that size finishes a meal in a few bites and moves on, not a lingering chew. Cutting to the family trudging off Charlie Brown-style drains all the tension the Allosaurus still being active nearby should carry. A shouted “run” as he goes down, or Denise landing a rifle shot on the creature mid-meal to explain their slow retreat, either would have hit harder. As is, it just doesn’t land.

Then the ending. Denise and the kids find a time portal and land about twenty minutes before the original anomaly, where Denise calls in a pizza order, which pulls Greg away and keeps him out of the original portal entirely. A news broadcast shows the incident now framed as two years in the past, other survivors included because Denise also called and warned them off beforehand. The final shot even shows Jeanette’s family alongside a second Jeanette. Looks happy if you don’t think about it for more than a second. Did Denise not also call to save herself and the kids in the original timeline? Shouldn’t there now be two versions of Denise, Brian, and Audrey, the ones who lived through the portal and the ones from before the jump? If she saved her past self, that past Denise now lives a life with Greg the movie’s Greg never dies in, so what happens to the versions who actually lived through everything we watched? If those versions still existed, wouldn’t the ones who came back through the portal cease to exist by paradox? None of it holds up. I wanted a dinosaur movie, and they handed me a logic puzzle instead.

I wanted this to be good, and there’s real evidence throughout that it could have been. The back half just does not follow through on what the first half sets up. Walking out of the theater I was close to an 8. The longer I sat with it, the more it settled at 6.5 out of 10. There’s real enjoyment here. It just doesn’t reach the films it’s chasing.