EWAN MCGREGOR AND ANNE HATHAWAY IN THE END OF OAK STREET
What if
After peaking in the view of most with his 2014 It Follows (preceded by The Myth of the American Sleepover in 2010 and followed by Under the Silver Lake in 2018), David Robert Mitchell has made a sort of summer family action adventure picture. Family in that it is about a family's survival. It's rated PG-13 "for intense creature violence, peril, and bloody images," and may be too scary to bring your actual younger family members to. Some say it's more a horror movie, really. If so perhaps my kind of horror movie because the setup is absorbing and astonishing enough to make you forget you're being manipulated for jump-shocks. Once the neighborhood's stormy overnight time-travel from 1982 to a prehistoric time and place overrun with rapacious dinosaurs (including those of the actual raptor group),the jump-shocks never stop so they're not contrived and manipulative, but just what's constantly going on.
Why would anyone ever say "Ho hum" to this? The dinosaurs, though from more than one geologic time period to achieve maximum chaos with a maximum number of colorful species, are still individually the most accurate you've ever seen in a movie. Big, little, beaked, fanged, scaly and feathered, strutting, wobbling, crawling and oozing, they're precisely themselves and you understand why they had to become extinct for humans to develop.
That's not the point, of course, which is that we follow the Platts, Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway), who are dad and mom, and Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella), who are son and older sister. Together they go through the hell into which their whole peaceful little suburban American neighborhood has been dropped, along with their cars and houses, which provide scant protection. They are pitifully unprotected and underarmed, but they're brave. If the casting of McGregor makes Greg seem weak, that works. For the moment, hours later, many of the horrible dinosaur-human encounters remain in the mind, most of all the giant worm sliding along the upstairs hallway unnoticed at first by Denise. Admittedly, at times there seemed a well-honed but still identifiable green screen look in the shots of people against new prehistoric background.
The trouble that may occur to you later is not that, though, but there isn't a sufficient dramatic structure to shape our perception of the experience other than before, after, and back to before. The mechanics used to explain and enable the vast time transitions may seem a bit perfunctory, but that isn't the problem. It's just that one may want the characters to do something more dramatic than just to survive, or not, and to declare new appreciation for each other and a promise neever to quarrel again. (And good luck with that.) Brilliantly convincing in its special effects and smooth-flowing in action, compelling and frightening, warm hearted in its human relations including rhe rescue of an orphaned girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), this is a nice little summer entertainment. And the real thing for that, maybe, is that all this horror is cause of many, many hugs.
The End of Oak Street, 93 mins., released Aug. 12, 2026 in the US. Metacritic rating: 68. Comparison: Sleepover 67, It Follows 83, Silver Lake 60. I don't agree with these nor does Mike D'Angelo, who gives the new film 52 and all three others over 70. I disagreed with the general dislike of Silver Lake. This new film, the most conventional, most lacking of any original touch. D'Angelo concludes his Patreon review with: "He's clearly doing his best to play ball here. Hope we get a banger from it." And soon. Why was it so long (eight years) from Silver Lake to this? Economics, probably, after Silver Lake flopped commercially and critically.