Nostalgic pop culture doesn’t need to feel like we’re watching a limp corpse being puppeteered around the room. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street reminds us of this, delivering palaeontological chaos of the Spielberg variety. It’s entertaining as hell and silly when it needs to be, without sacrificing too much of the disaffected cool-kid style of the director’s previous, adult-orientated output – namely It Follows (2014), a horror haunted by suburban decay.
The End of Oak Street is not only better than any of the Jurassic World films, but so much less stiff and fetishistic than the exhaustive line of Eighties “love letters” produced by Stranger Things’ Shawn Levy and his ilk. It also sees Anne Hathaway extend her formidable 2026 run (that also includes Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey), acting up such a storm you wonder why those dinosaurs don’t just turn tail in fear and run.
