More Than Dinosaurs
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella
Released August 14th, 2026
Rated PG-13
Do you want to see Anne Hathaway shoot a dinosaur with a shotgun? Of course you do! That’s just one of the pleasures awaiting you in The End of Oak Street, the latest oddball film from writer/director David Robert Mitchell. His last movie was the exceedingly strange shaggy dog detective story Under the Silver Lake, which was one of my favorite movies the year it was released. I’m less fond of his horror film It Follows, but that one has plenty of fans, and is soon getting a sequel, They Follow. One thing you’re sure to get in a film from David Robert Mitchell is an experience that is more than meets the eye. That is certainly the case with The End of Oak Street, a story that starts off as a family drama set in the early 1980s, before becoming a rampaging monster movie, and concluding as a time travel tale. All three of these genres work pretty well together, thanks in no small part to Michael Giacchino’s rousing score and Michael Gioulakis’s Amblin-inspired cinematography.
Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) is a frustrated wannabe writer whose lack of faith in her ability to write is so strong she hides her hobby from her family, only taking to her typewriter alone at night in the basement. Her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) is trying to make some extra cash by delivering pizzas, something that his wife not only feels is beneath him, but doesn’t miss an opportunity to tell him so. What Greg hasn’t told her is that he lost his main job a few weeks back and he’s struggling just to make ends meet. Greg deals with his stress with whiskey, much to Denise’s dismay. They are unaware that their young son Brian (Christian Convery) is having a hard time dealing with the anxiety that is building inside of him each time he sees his parents argue. His older sister Audrey (Maisy Stella) is less concerned about their parent’s possible impending divorce, and more focused on following her idol Carl Sagan down the path of cosmic exploration. Meanwhile, the family dog Starbuck (played by two very good boys, Buzz and Bisket) is content to dig holes in the backyard of their uptight neighbor, Mel (P. J. Byrne).
The feeling of displacement in their own lives that the Platt family is experiencing gets exponentially larger once their entire neighborhood is inexplicitly thrown hundreds of millions of years into the past. The first thing the occupants of the suburban block notice is how hot the air has gotten. Then they spot strange plants and trees have sprung up around them. Then they start being eaten by rampaging dinosaurs. This is a cruel movie! You’re going to see men, women, children, dogs, and cats terrorized by various vicious prehistoric animals. There is nowhere safe for these unfortunate souls to escape to, since outside of their time-displaced neighborhood, the rest of the planet is how it was millions of years ago. Since daughter Audrey is a science nerd, she is able to explain to her freaked out family the concept of wormholes and how they may be able to travel back to 1982. The Platt family bands together with Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), a terrified and recently orphaned teenager, to do their best to survive the insane circumstance they find themselves in, and find a way back to their time.
It’s impossible to discuss dinosaur movies without mentioning Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece Jurassic Park. That’s a film that’s packed with iconic sequences, with one of the standout scenes involving a pair of velociraptors loose in a kitchen. That scene has been referenced by many filmmakers since, including Spielberg himself in his 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction epic War of the Worlds. David Robert Mitchell stages a similar scene in The End of Oak Street that focuses on a terrifying Titanoboa slithering around undetected in the Platt family house while they are fortifying themselves with supplies for survival. The bone-white Titanoboa is absolutely huge with a maw filled with sharp teeth. It’s a tense scene that’s very well orchestrated and that will probably give you nightmares if you are even the least bit wary of snakes.
I am wearing a Roxy Music T-shirt while I write this review, something I only bring up because one of the many era-appropriate needle drops in The End of Oak Street is “More Than This” from Roxy’s wonderful 1982 album Avalon. You’ll also hear “Shake it Up” by The Cars in the background of a block party barbeque, and we see daughter Audrey singing along to Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” in an emotional moment that probably telegraphs something about her character. It’s a neat element of the film that the dinosaurs are feathered. This aligns with what we know now about these creatures, but that was not the case back in 1982. This was still a few years before paleontologist Robert Bakker would write The Dinosaur Heresies, which posited that dinosaurs were most likely bird-like, feathered, warm-blooded animals. And so, when young Brian Platt flips through his handy encyclopedia, he sees depictions of lizard-like dinosaurs instead of the more bird-like creatures now roaming his neighborhood.
Maisy Stella and Christian Convery are both believable as the Platt children, and of course, whether she’s using a typewriter or brandishing a firearm, Anne Hathaway can do no wrong. I’m not sure why the filmmakers couldn’t have let Ewan McGregor’s character be Scottish, since his attempt at an American accent is dodgy at best. The End of Oak Street concludes with a nice and tidy ending that would not feel out of place in an episode of Amazing Stories. The film does a good job fooling the audience into thinking it’s seen a happy ending, with characters smiling and laughing. Once you start to put the pieces of what transpired together, it becomes clear that this is actually a much more complicated ending that raises a Brontosaurus-sized number of questions. These are fun to think about, and I would not be opposed to exploring those questions in a follow up film, should David Robert Mitchell feel like returning to this strange reality he has created.