The End Of Oak Street

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 20, 2026.

(M) ★★★

Director: David Robert Mitchell.

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery.

No pants, just sacks.

I've often wondered why there aren't more movies about dinosaurs outside of the Jurassic Park series. Dinosaurs are cool, yet they don't seem to turn up in a lot of films. Or not enough for my preference.

Part of the problem no doubt is how to wedge them into a plot in a new way - we've done de-extinction (the Jurassic Park series), dino planets (65), and lost worlds/islands/jungles (going all the way back to The Lost World in 1925).

So full points to The End Of Oak Street, which takes a novel approach to injecting dinosaurs into a film - by transplanting an entire neighbourhood from 1982 into the Mesozoic Era via a loosely explained phenomena.

This temporal displacement puts regular 1982 dysfunctional family the Platts on the menu for a huge number of dinosaurs, as their once-quiet suburban home becomes an apocalyptic nightmare.

If you watched this trailer and expected this to be some kind of slightly dark but slightly funny family adventure, you'd be dead wrong about the second bit. The End Of Oak Street is a daylight horror with next-to-no sense of humour. It's more of a survival film than anything else - once the "event" happens and the dinos appear, this is a balls-to-wall nailbiter.

It's a shame because a sense of humour or at least a sense of self-awareness might have elevated this to something truly special. Instead this is a serviceable actioner with a surprising brutality to it, yet is oddly po-faced in the face of its plot's absurdity.

McGregor and Hathaway are totally comfortable playing this straight, especially the latter, who channels the great scream queens with a touch of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley - she effortlessly switches from terrified to gun-toting and back again in the face of the insanity. In between, they're a believable couple going through a very rough patch in their marriage, thrown into a prehistoric nightmare.

With most of the action taking place in sunlit suburban streets, so there's no hiding the CG in the dark or the rain, but there's no fear because the effects look great. It's also in the film's favour that we see things we've never seen before. An allosaurus and a titanoboa star in two of the most nail-biting scenes, which will live long in the memory.

Maybe the rest will prove memorable as time goes on (even its bold-if-questionable ending). But for now this surprisingly grim dino-thriller is a good time-filler, without being as fun as you'd think.