‘The End of Oak Street’ review: ’80s Spielberg cosplay

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.

In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block. Nevertheless, they’re miserable.

The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors. Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn. It’s a tad stale.

The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J. Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest. Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them. And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank. I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.

Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky. If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day” earlier this summer. To its credit, there’s a monster attack every three minutes.

Mitchell’s special effects team has cleverly chosen to give the raptors mangy feathers. They and the other dinosaurs — a T. rex, an armored ankylosaurus, a sight-gag-worthy giant snake — adapt to the 20th century as comfortably as coyotes, skulking through backyards in search of prey. (House cats, look out.) In the same spirit, the humans don’t pause for a second of awe beyond a funny surprise involving two sauropods. McGregor’s dad even suggests driving through a herd of small stegosauruses, insisting with unmerited optimism that they’ll simply move out of the way.

Hathaway’s Denise, the pessimist, is quick to grab a dead friend’s gun. Other survivors, including an irritable neighbor, Mel (P.J. Byrne), lack firearm safety. The distant pop-pop-scream of frantic bullet sprays is as unnerving as the film’s one and only good jump scare. Nevertheless, the family spends way too much time leisurely chatting outside in the danger zone. Convery’s Brian even tries flirting with a traumatized Catholic girl (Jordan Alexa Davis) on a front lawn with the line, “What’s it like going to private school?

The first chunk of the movie is a teary adventure drama; the last, an amiable group hug. In the middle, Mitchell decides his characters are morons and “Oak Street” becomes a comedy. Once the audience gets past their disorientation, the slapstick triggers enough silly goodwill that my auditorium squeezed out generous spurts of applause.

McGregor and Hathaway try to keep pace with the shifting tones. He gamely wears striped socks and short shorts; she sports Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and clings to her character’s emotional truth like it’s a bucking pterodactyl. Hathaway can handle anything, from a despondent housewife to a rifle-toting badass, but I’ve never seen her tasked to do both in a film this brisk.

As the couple’s children, Stella and Convery acquit themselves well. Like Hathaway, Stella acts her part so sincerely that you’re not sure if Mitchell clued her in that the movie at large is nonsense. (Maybe he and editor John Axelrad didn’t decide on that themselves until they had to jam these scenes together.) As she managed in the quite good sci-fi coming-of-age dramedy “My Old Ass,” Stella has a knack for giving authenticity to the outlandish — a naturalistic conviction that reminds me of Florence Pugh.

Convery has nicely feathered hair and a character burdened by the plot’s corniest contrivances: a bully stubbornly pursuing him to the literal end of civilization, a lost pet dog that he’s determined to rescue. The mutt’s name is Starbuck and I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was chosen not only as a nod to “Moby Dick,” but to emphasize that this adorable town has yet to be invaded by local business-gobbling frappuccinos.

“Oak Street” is Mitchell’s first film in eight years after a strong start as an auteur. “It Follows,” his breakout 2014 hit, was a buzzy million-dollar horror film with a catchy premise and sparks of ingenious production design. “Obsession” fans who haven’t caught up with that one should give it a watch.

His far stranger movie after that, 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” was a genre-defying Los Angeles comic-noir with Andrew Garfield as a hipster tangled up in a bizarre cult. Narratively, “Silver Lake” barely held together and might be responsible for his extended hiatus. But I’ve come to love how Mitchell nailed being a nocturnal 20-something who winds up somewhere unpredictable whenever he leaves the apartment. Plus, it’s a subtler period piece than “Oak Street,” rewinding back only to the 2011 era of indie sleaze, which it captured so effortlessly that the audience needed a few more years to appreciate the distinction.

Mitchell is almost — almost — a master of mood. The trouble here is the closer he comes to achieving it, the less Mitchell himself seems to exist. His blatant ambitions trip him up. (Similarly, “Oak Street’s” cinematographer Michael Gioulakis does fine work until he hits a scene that’s all split-diopter shots just because.) It’s easy to empathize with his need to prove he can make a big-budget crowd-pleaser. Still, I’d never have guessed Mitchell’s long-anticipated resurrection would look like another director’s movie entirely.

“Oak Street’s” retro-Spielbergian setting is faithful to a geothermal fault. I’m straddling both sides of it. On one hand, it’s nice to see young Brian scamper up to his bedroom to crack open an encyclopedia or hear a herd of theropods stampede on the roof of an all-metal car. Yet, I’d also like to see Hollywood make a PG-13 family romp without having to get so self-conscious about it. After all, back in 1982, Spielberg was riffing on the ‘50s schlock he loved as a boy and didn’t need poodle skirts to do it. How great if this type of four-quadrant filmmaking didn’t have to cosplay as a begotten relic — if it could take courage from these dinosaurs and thrive in our modern times.