MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.