Low expectations can be a gift. Walking into 'The End of Oak Street' knowing only that Anne Hathaway was fighting dinosaurs in an eighties suburban setting, we were not expecting much beyond spectacle. What we got was something more interesting than the trailer suggested — and considerably more frustrating than it needed to be.
The Setup
The film opens in the eighties on Oak Street, where Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) are navigating a marriage that is quietly falling apart. Denise wants to leave — she is becoming a writer, which is apparently her role across her entire 2026 filmography. She played a writer in Devil Wears Prada 2, she plays one here, and she plays one in Verity. Anne Hathaway is single-handedly keeping the literary community represented on screen this year, and we respect the commitment.
One night the family is woken by blinding white light and finds themselves transported to a prehistoric era — their entire block, their neighbours, their problems, and all, dropped into the middle of a dinosaur-inhabited world. Survival instincts kick in. Marital problems, less so. There is a genuinely tense moment with a dinosaur immediately followed by Denise and Greg resuming their argument about the state of their marriage. We appreciate the commitment to realism, but perhaps the dinosaurs take priority.
What Works
The CGI is quite impressive. The visual depiction of the dinosaurs is detailed, considered, and at its best, terrifying. The two dinosaurs on the roof are the film's most playful moment and one of its most effective.
Hathaway is excellent. Her frustration reads clearly, her emotional range keeps the domestic storyline grounded even when it threatens to derail the pacing, and she is the reason the ending lands at all. Denise uses the knowledge of what happened to go back and save her neighbours — calling her husband away from the block, warning the librarian, contacting each person one by one.
What Doesn't
Ewan McGregor is serviceable but occasionally flat in ways that are hard to ignore. The scene where the family first realises dinosaurs are surrounding their barricaded house needed raw, visceral fear. What we got was considerably more muted — and it broke the tension at the worst moment.
The bigger issue is restraint. For a dinosaur film, we see surprisingly little of the dinosaurs actually doing anything. Two significant sequences. The rest is suggestion and sound design. If you build a film around prehistoric predators as your central threat, you owe the audience more than two meaningful encounters.
The film also never explains how Oak Street ended up in the prehistoric era. Some ambiguity is elegant. This felt more like an unanswered question than a deliberate choice.
The Verdict
The End of Oak Street is a good film that stops short of being a great one. The visuals are strong, Hathaway is excellent, and the ending is genuinely satisfying. But it needed more dinosaurs, more McGregor, and more answers. ★★★½
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