YNOT at the Movies

A family spends ninety-nine minutes running through the same neighborhood yelling each other's names, and that's about as far as the imagination goes in writer-director David Robert Mitchell's ridiculous "The End of Oak Street" (USA 2026 | 99 min.).

A mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and drops it somewhere prehistoric, dinosaurs start hunting the residents, and a family sprints from house to house while shouting for each other. That's the whole movie. The setup owes an obvious debt to "Poltergeist" (1982), a suburban household under siege by forces the script can't be bothered to explain, and the chase mechanics are lifted wholesale from "Jurassic Park" (1993) without any of that film's patience for staging or geography.

Set in 1982, Denise (Anne Hathaway) and her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) are dealing with a marriage going stale, while their daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery) feel the tension building at home. None of that family drama survives the plot. Once the portal opens and the dinosaurs show up, the movie stops being about a family and starts being about four people running in the same general direction while something with teeth follows behind. Even the basic logic of the threat goes unexamined: species that would have spent their actual lives grazing behave here like uniform killing machines, because the film needs bodies chased and doesn't care to sort out which prehistoric animals would plausibly be doing the chasing.

That flattening extends to the way danger gets telegraphed. You can clock which side of the frame a dinosaur is about to enter from a beat before it happens, and the jump scares arrive on a schedule regular enough to set a watch to. The family somehow never catches on, running past the same blind corners scene after scene as if they haven't lived through the previous four ambushes. A movie this repetitive needs either surprise or craft to cover for it, and it has neither. Even the creatures themselves appear generic, despite a visual effects team with award-nominated blockbuster work behind them and a director's intention of wanting the dinosaurs to feel like real animals.

The performances don't do much to rescue any of it. Hathaway and McGregor are both better than this material, and it shows in how strained their line readings get whenever the script asks them to sell a moment of marital heartbreak seconds before pivoting to a monster attack. Stella and Convery, playing teenagers thrown into mortal danger, mostly register as scared kids yelling directions at each other, which is a fair description of most of their screen time. None of it reads as embarrassing so much as unsupported: there's nowhere for these actors to build a character when every scene resets the tension to the same pitch. The result is a cast working hard for a movie that never lets them go anywhere.

This movie wants credit for scale and doesn't earn it on execution. Nearly every beat is visible a full scene ahead of when it arrives, and a premise this odd deserved more than a family retracing the same neighborhood over and over.

"The End of Oak Street" opens in theaters on Friday, August 14, 2026.