Ron’s Review

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I’d seen some trailers for The End of Oak Street and I really wanted to watch it. 2026 is Anne Hathaway’s year, but I also feel like I haven’t seen Ewan McGregor in anything new in ages. Also, dinosaurs. Who doesn’t love watching dinosaurs?

I had fun watching this movie. It’s not very deep – a family finds that their entire neighbourhood has been sent back in time to the prehistoric world. Can they survive long enough to find a way home? In and amongst the danger is a marriage falling apart, queer awakenings, and a boy’s endless love for his dog. No, seriously, the dog is important.

The trailers made this film seem way more comedic than it was. This film is intense! There’s a lot of danger, and people being ripped apart by dinosaurs. Despite some moments of silly and gross humour, the film is about survival when there is literally no help coming.

I found the family dynamic to be an interesting undertone in the film – the parents are not just fighting dinosaurs, they’re also fighting their crumbling marriage. Even though there are dangers around them, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re human and they’ve got issues to work through. Issues that sometimes get in the way of making decisions when dinosaurs are attacking them.

The young actors do a pretty good job. It feels like the four family members are really a family, and that’s important in a film like this.

I did find the first act to be a little slow. Until the dinosaurs turned up, the film felt plodding. I understand trying to build the world and the character dynamics, but it took a bit longer than necessary.

I haven’t seen any of David Robert Mitchell’s work before but I liked his directing style, for the most part. Letting the camera pan as the action happens in the foreground and background seems very 80s – when this film is set – but it’s exactly what you need to do to immerse the audience in the film. The only misses were when he used close-ups during family conversations. It wasn’t the right choice for that kind of scene.

I enjoyed this film. Was the ending a little twee? Who cares? It’s fun. Is everything explained? No, and also, it doesn’t need to be. This film has dinosaurs. Hathaway and McGregor are lovely to watch. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, and some very sweet ones. A good way to spend an evening.

Mon’s Review

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I think I’d seen snippets of this film, but I knew nothing about The End of Oak Street going into it. I thought, having seen the aesthetics, that this was going to be a laugh-riot comedy. It is decidedly not.

The Platt family are putting on the facade of being the perfect, happy family, but they’re falling apart. Dad Gregg (Ewan McGregor) and Mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) are going through a rough time, while the kids Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella) are facing the uphill battles of teenage angst.

And then something even worse happens—their entire neighbourhood gets transported to the prehistoric era and suddenly the family are fighting for their literal lives against dinosaurs.

This movie is intense. And stressful. The pacing at the start is plodding, like the writer-director David Robert Mitchell couldn’t wait to get to the dinosaurs and was struggling to get the foundations out of the way. After that though, the action is riveting. We have long takes to keep us glued to the tension of the scenes.

I didn’t find the film that much fun, because there was peril everywhere. The End of Oak Street is really immersive with so much action going on in the background, you’re aware of the dangers the characters are in before even they are. In that sense, the film really works. It’s on me that I was expecting this to be a comedy.

The End of Oak Street exudes 80s. The 80s setting of the film, the aesthetic, some of the plot points, the see-sawing tonal changes, and the general story structure, are all 80s. I do wish the family dynamics had been built out better, but it was obvious the writer wasn’t that invested in it. We get enough, but it’s for plot purposes only.

There’s a sense of artifice that comes from sticking to the bit, which makes the viewing experience very confusing. If you want to get lost in a story, watch The End of Oak Street. This is an immersive film, but it’s so stressful.