Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor Fight Dinosaurs Like It's 1982

"The End of Oak Street" opens August 14, and the first reviews agree on one thing before they disagree on everything else: this is a movie built to look like it was made forty years ago, on purpose.

Suburbia, Interrupted

Directed and written by David Robert Mitchell, "The End of Oak Street" tears one cul-de-sac loose from the rest of the world. After a cosmic event rips Oak Street away from its own suburb, the Platt family finds themselves stranded somewhere unrecognizable, in a story that Warner Bros. has pitched as a straight throwback to the teen-and-tween adventure films of the early-to-mid 1980s. The setting is 1982, and Variety's review called it a dinosaur horror film in that exact lineage — closer in spirit to "Jurassic Park" than to anything released this decade.

J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella produced alongside Mitchell, Matt Jackson, and Tommy Harper, and that Abrams connection shows up in nearly every review as a reference point for the film's Amblin-style tone.

Photo: Kevin Paul · CC BY 4.0 · source

A Family Built Like the Platts

Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the cast as the elder Platts, with Maisy Stella and Christian Convery playing their children; P.J. Byrne and Chris Coy round out the ensemble. The Hollywood Reporter's review described Hathaway and McGregor anchoring what it called "ersatz '80s Amblin nostalgia" — a phrase meant as a compliment about the film's craft and a shrug about its originality in the same breath.

That split runs through nearly every notice so far: nobody is arguing the cast isn't committed, or that the production doesn't nail the look of the period. The disagreement is about how much a movie earns just by getting the wallpaper right.