The End of Oak Street (2026)
***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery
written and directed by David Robert Mitchell
by Walter Chaw David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street feels like a lost Spielberg film. There’s a two-year gap in Steven Spielberg’s filmography between 1941 (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and that’s the slot in which this most slavishly Spielbergian film since J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 belongs. It’s the space where Spielberg was reeling from his first commercial and critical failure–where he might have been taking stock of what it was that really worked about Jaws and Close Encounters of the First Kind. Mitchell’s film is essentially an amalgam of the pedal-to-the-floor set-piece structure of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the suburban idealization of its follow-up, E.T.–the birth moment of a style so distinctive, it will be the first thing even non-cinephiles notice about this film. “I’ve been here before…” they will think. Collective cinematic hiraeth: if you were raised in this culture, this is the childhood you remember. Period-appropriate mom jeans and dad workout shorts with tube socks? Check. Squabbling tween siblings? Check, check. Suburban milieu patrolled by adorable dogs and kids on Schwinns? Man, you know that’s a Roger. There’s also a lovely moment early on where a young woman’s head is framed so perfectly by a lens flare (a quintessential Spielberg visual hallmark that works like an artist’s signature now) that she looks, appropriately, like a sacred Giotto illumination, complete with glorious harp arpeggios on the soundtrack. Many will call The End of Oak Street a spiritual sequel to Jurassic Park, but it’s more a Spielbergian take on Stephen King’s novella The Mist, except instead of fucked-up other-dimensional monsters, the beasties invading the aggressively WASPy middle-class enclave of the title are Late Cretaceous dinosaurs. It’s everything you’d want from a movie. Even my favourite dinosaur, Isaac from “The Love Boat”, makes a cameo on a television running in the background of a Spielberg™ family dinner scene.
