Balance that concession stand box in your lap because The End of Oak Street is a popcorn movie delivering impressive suspense and visual spectacle not seen since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993).
Dinosaur fans have waited for this kind of movie for 33 years.
There’s a sense of wonder, constant feeling of danger, and excitement of not knowing what’s happening next without ever reinventing the genre.
The Platt family sticks together, as much as is possible, to find their way through unfamiliar surroundings in their ripped from reality suburban neighbourhood, Flowerdale, after a cosmic event.
Lightning, thunder, flashes of blinding light, increased temperature, plants that haven’t been existed in 200,000 years, and predatory Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) dinosaurs with feathers and hair – so different from, yet acceptable to the reptilian CGI monsters of the Jurassic Park franchise.
Producer J.J. Abrams of Bad Robot and director Mitchell set the story in 1982, the year of Spielberg’s Poltergeist which created the same sort of mystery and wonder.
Producer and director loved seeing ’80s films as children and here pay homage to or reference Spielberg.
There are more Easter eggs than you are able to identify.
It’s a deep dive into period detail too: the TV shows, TV commercials, chart music, even Froot Loops for breakfast.
Remember the huge dinosaur dung mound which so fascinated the “tourists” of Jurassic Park?
More homage, though a questionable message of honour, is another mound of dinosaur poo in the backyard of constant complainant neighbour Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne).
Suggesting it may have been left by the Platt family dog Starbuck, father Greg Platt promises to clean it up with typical teenage son Brian (Christian Convery) objecting with a frown and eye roll.
Christian Convery now 16, if you recall, starred in and won an Emmy for his role in the post- apocalyptic adventure Sweet Tooth (2021-2024), 24 episodes over three seasons.
He was a half-deer, half boy at 11-years-old. Convery was the young Victor Frankenstein in Guillermo de Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) and Henry in Cocaine Bear (2023).
The Platt children, Brian and Audrey (Maisy Stella) are worried their parents might be on the verge of divorce.
Dad lost his real job and resorted to pizza delivery, a large triangular sign atop the family car. “Help me take this off,” Dad says to son, “Your Mum doesn’t like it.”
Mum Denise (Anne Hathaway) has been busy in the basement typing her memoirs based upon a prescient that the marriage is a failure.
Before cosmic intervention, there exists a local neighbourhood bully, Kaden Tucker (the late Hudson Meek), the antagonist with a brother named Charles locked in bitter conflict with Brian.
An eye-catching cinematographic achievement, but one of the hardest to pull off, is using split dioptre shots wherein a half convex lens is placed over the camera’s main lens.
Half of the lens is “near-sighted”, acting like a magnifying glass allowing a camera to focus on a foreground subject and, the uncovered half of the lens being “far-sighted” keeps the background subject sharply focussed.
A character’s face dominates the foreground in focus. Another character is seen full body, also complete focus. It allows for talking and listening.
The split dioptre is used effectively in a cross-legged-seated family discussion wherein Dad insists there’s God to look after them and daughter says she doesn’t believe in God.
Of dinosaur attacks, my audience cringed, sometimes laughed. A laugh has to be provided in the movie or the audience will laugh in all the wrong places.
If you’re a dino fan, this isn’t a necessary movie, but it will entertain and satisfy, make you feel the worth of admission price.
