Time warps and dinosaurs and Anne Hathaway, oh my!

The first reviews are pouring in for The End of Oak Street, the latest genre blender from It Follows and Under the Silver Lake helmer David Robert Mitchell, and the fourth advance in Hathaway’s ongoing march toward dominance at the 2026 multiplex.

Following her lavish turns in Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey, Hathaway shrinks down to conventional housewife size to play the frustrated Denise Platt, trying to hold her smarmy husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) and errant kids (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) together until their world explodes apart, and the Platt family is plunged from their suburban ’80s mundanity into a world overrun by bloodthirsty dinosaurs. Really!

Overall, critics were pleased with The End of Oak Street, advising audiences to gloss over potential plot snags and world-building incongruities to let the pure spectacle wash over and delight. But let’s dive into the good, the bad, and everything else critics had to say about the film.
The Good
For RogerEbert.com, Zachary Lee praised the film as “the type of ambitious blockbuster that excites not just due to the blood it draws on screen (of which there are copious amounts), but for how it cuts deep into the interior lives of its characters.”

That was a common sentiment among the film’s champions. For Vulture, Alison Willmore writes, “I can’t fathom how The End of Oak Street actually exists, even if it is a perfect example of what the big studios should be doing right now — making original spectacles, ideally ones in which Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor.” In his Critics’ Pick review, The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz argued, “There is no denying the filmmaker’s zest for keeping things as efficient and entertaining as possible.”

And what kind of entertainment? “Dumb fun done well.”

Bloody Disgusting’s Megan Navarro thumbs-upped the film as “classic summer blockbuster fare” with “no shortage of breathless set pieces, and terrifying dino encounters,” even if it “doesn’t rise above its influences.”

About those influences. In review after review, top critics called out how indebted The End of Oak Street is to Steven Spielberg, particularly his hit-making run at Amblin Films in the 1980s. It’s here that critics cleave from positive to negative assessment.

Slate’s Sam Adams called The End of Oak Street “the best Spielberg movie of the year,” while Rolling Stone’s David Fear praised the film as “easily the best homage-slash-rip-off of a Spielberg movie in ages.” The fact that Mitchell wears his influence so proudly on his sleeve did not sit well with everyone.
The Bad
Rocco Thompson found The End of Oak Street “an Amblin-esque, four-quadrant sci-fi adventure that tries to out-Spielberg the very franchise that the generation-defining director launched” in his review for Slant. But unlike Spielberg, who launched dino-mania with Jurassic Park in 1993, Mitchell “doesn’t cook up any truly showstopping or novel sequences,” but doesn’t fully commit to the nastiness” either.

In one of the hottest takes of the End of Oak Street review blitz thus far, the Boston Globe’s Odie Henderson writes that “Mitchell summons the ghosts of Amblin Entertainment movies past,” but “what Mitchell failed to remember is that these teen-friendly movies weren’t that good in the first place.”

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The subtitle of Kristy Puchko’s review for Mashable sums up what The End of Oak Street’s detractors thought of Mitchell’s attempt to fuse dumb fun with genuine pathos: “Imagine Jurassic Park but bleak and stupid.” Putchko elaborates that the question at the film’s core is “not really about whether its American nuclear family will survive,” but “what happens when the Amblin aesthetic is used as a husk to express a deep disdain for humankind.”

The A.V. Club’s Jacob Oller zeroes in on Mitchell’s attempt to imbue the film with heart, but laments that “The End Of Oak Street doesn’t bother thinking much through.” For Oller, the Platt family were sketched in “broad strokes, whipped across the film’s canvas with the carelessness of someone single-mindedly intent on getting to the damn dinos already.”
Everything Else
Even the most enthusiastic critics had their gripes about the film — as did the detractors with their grudging compliments.

The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey found that The End of Oak Street “allows something more raw, and more distinctly modern, to creep in,” even if “Mitchell’s film can be absurd, sentimental and, at times, violent and merciless.” Nikki Baughan wrote in Screen that while the screenplay’s “rinse-and-repeat formula of danger-escape-danger could feel repetitive,” there is “enough novelty in the set-up, and enough surprises along the way, to keep things interesting.”

Luke Hicks closed out his review for The Film Stage by looking to the future — Mitchell’s future: “A bevy of questions linger after a fun, funny, relatively forgettable film ends: Is this what Mitchell has been working on for eight years? Where has he been? Will he return with something more unique in the future?” He asks. If we are, as Mitchell’s fans hope, “on the verge of a DRM renaissance,” The End of Oak Street can be seen as “an amusing if fleeting restart for the director.

source: https://ew.com/what-critics-are-saying-about-the-end-of-oak-street-12059776