Anne Hathaway’s Nasty Little Dinosaur Movie Is Better Than Any Jurassic Park in Years

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About a third of the way into The End of Oak Street , there’s a scene where Audrey Platt (Maisy Stella) sneaks away from her family to have a minute to herself. Given that they’ve all been transported from 1982 to the Mesozoic era, where rampaging allosauruses and pterosaurs have torn some of their neighbors to bloody shreds, she’s understandably a little bit shaken and in need of some comfort. So she slips into the garage, quietly turns the key, and pops in a cassette of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie.” There’s no power in the past, no gasoline or batteries, so every minute she listens brings her closer to a time when the last ties to the world she knew will be gone forever, and there’s a decent chance the sound of the music might attract some sharp-toothed predator that will make a quick meal of her. But the movie doesn’t punish her need to carve a brief moment of beauty, however fleeting, out of the terrifying battle for survival her life has abruptly become. She sits behind the wheel, singing along to Winwood’s carefree hit, and we just sit with her, grabbing the chance to catch our breath.

I dwell on this moment because Oak Street does, and because it’s part of what makes David Robert Mitchell’s movie stand out from the summer blockbuster field. Mitchell’s take on the family adventure is leisurely and sincere, lavishing a third of its length on the slow build to a revelation that the posters give away in an instant, and taking the possibility that Audrey’s brother Brian (Christian Convery) might get his ass kicked by a neighborhood bully as seriously as it does any dino attack. It’s also, at times, brutally blunt and darkly funny, serving up some of its grisliest deaths with tongue savagely in cheek.

The Platts are a middle-class family on the verge of falling apart. Greg (Ewan McGregor) works as a pizza delivery driver to supplement the income from his regular job; Denise (Anne Hathaway) sneaks off to the basement at night to work on a novel about a woman escaping her dead-end life. They’re unhappy in the most ordinary of ways—she worries about everything, while he insists everything will work out for the best—but it’s been eating away at them for a long time, and their reserves of goodwill are nearly tapped out. They live on a suburban cul-de-sac full of happy-looking families, but perhaps their proximity to all that domestic bliss makes their attempts at pretending fall short by comparison, or maybe they just don’t know how to unite against a threat that can always be ignored for one more day.

Then, well: Dinosaurs. Mitchell has access to astronomically more advanced technology than Steven Spielberg had when he made Jurassic Park more than 30 years ago, but he deploys many of the same strategies, to great cumulative effect. We hear a rumble, see a bush move, catch a glimpse of a bony ridge peeking up behind a two-story house or a reflection in a window that vanishes just before the camera comes into focus.