I’m a little delayed in writing this review, and that’s because I was so enthused walking out of the theatre about the experience I just had that I decided instead of heading straight home and immediately getting behind my laptop, I was instead going to cross the road, put my headphones on, load up Let Me Roll it by Paul McCartney and Wings, and take a nice, long, seafront stroll, grinning cheek-to-cheek filled with all the love in the world for the movies.
Simply put, The End of Oak Street is a PROPER movie. David Robert Mitchell’s fourth feature-length film is a rip-roaring hoot that sees Jurassic Park meet Poltergeist meet The Goonies in a Steven Spielberg-esque throwback summer blockbuster that has all the ingredients to establish itself as an immediate cult classic: dinosaurs, dogs, the trauma of your parents’ doomed relationship (are we sure this isn’t a Steven Spielberg movie?), Anne Hathaway, time travel, guns, Anne Hathaway; it’s a full course meal, and I ate up every moment of it.
The movie follows the Platt family on their journey through time, picking up on a sunny day in 1982 on Flowervale Street; the neighbourhood is out, the grill is on, all is great in this isolated corner of the world — except for Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg’s (Ewan McGregor) marriage, which has reached a point of almost no return. But the film gives its take on a question that the movies have been trying to answer for years: is there a way back for the unhappy and unfulfilled couple? David Robert Mitchell certainly thinks so, but he thinks it might just take an event of unimaginable consequences to make it possible, to realise what matters most. In the case of this family on the verge, it takes being transported back to a time before us, before anything, really. A time of T-Rex’s and Stegosaurus’ but apparently still a time of doing it doggy (or dino) style (IYKYK).
Here, in this new/old world, the dino’s are revealed to be the central hurdle our family need to vault if they want to make it back home. And whilst there’s never quite a moment as magic as seeing the T-Rex for the first time in Jurassic Park, it’s the closest the movies have come since 1993 — far closer that any of the sequels that the Spielberg-directed classic spawned.
And that’s exactly what’s most impressive about The End of Oak Street: it manages to remain wholly unique and original whilst clearly paying homage to a wave of films that paved the way for it to exist. Mitchell’s distinctive sleek, indie and camera-fluid filmmaking style — which was hugely present in his previous two efforts, It Follows and Under the Silver Lake — is at no point lost amongst the scale of what is his biggest film yet. A film oozing with creativity and originality — everything the Jurassic World franchise is yet to be, with all the sweeping movie magic that those films can, at times, provide.
Specifically, Mitchell opts to utilise the split diopter shot on more than one occasion throughout this film, and whilst his usage of the Brian De Palma-popularised camera technique could potentially veer into the gimmicky territory, I believe it breathes life into some of the films more expository scenes — reminding us that there’s life behind this camera, still.
Hathaway is the film’s standout performer, and solidifies her 2026 as one of the great movie star years in recent memory. A year that kicked off with Mother Mary for A24 before returning to the role of Andy Sachs in the lights out box office smash sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2, but it’s her summertime sadness that’s proved to be most fruitful. With her starring role as Penelope in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey — a woman yearning to see the long overdue return of her husband — and Denise in The End of Oak Street — a mother bound by the restrictions placed on her by the circumstances in which she finds herself — seeing the star provide some of the finest work of her career. She’s gets emotional, she goes big, she goes small, she wields weapons, she’s really doing the heavy lifting in this fatal 4-way — especially given McGregor’s inability to ever truly settle into his accent or role. And with the Colleen Hoover adaptation, Verity — also starring Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett — on the books for October, it would appear Hathaway has truly found the modern movie star formula. Rivalled, perhaps, only by Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in our current landscape.
Really I just can’t recommend The End of Oak Street enough. I‘d be remiss not to say that it’s by no means a perfect film; as alluded to, McGregor struggles — a surprising turn given the level of performance he’s put up over the years — and the script no doubt feels secondary to the on-screen wonder, but hey, it’s a visual medium after all! And the images on screen, paired with the ’80s needle drops, Michael Giacchino’s score, and the innate weirdness of it all, makes for an absolute blast. One of the easiest recommendations of the summer. A big thumbs-up.