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

Nostalgia can be a narcotic. If you've lived long enough to have a simulacrum of your childhood sold back you, it's better than being dead, but it's often kind of sad too. It's a sign you've aged into the most heavily marketed to age bracket, and as culture and art goes, the results vary wildly. Experiences, pieces of culture, environments erased by time, all things that contribute to the person you've become, end up being treated like superficial commodities, and often, in the rush for nostalgia, why they were impactful gets passed over for something cheaper, that stupefying, head in the sand instinct to moon over the "good old days."

Over the last decade this process has begun for the 1980s and 1990s. The most self conscious variety tends to turn out the worst, reaching for the things which were more likely in magazine covers, music videos and movies than they were to be found in the households and Main Streets. Often, these are more akin to kitsch, being sold to a generation that sees these creative efforts as some combination of anthropological assessment and a good way to have a laugh at an older generations expense. We, of the older generations, do deserve to be laughed at, but kitsch nostalgia films often fail to understand the more substantive absurdities, and instead reach for the lowest hanging fruit. "Oh my god! I can't believe people wore their hair like that," can be funny, but it becomes dull after the fourth joke.

Fortunately, The End of Oak Street is directed by someone who actually was a child in the eighties, David Robert Mitchell, and it lacks any of that self consciousness. This is a fantasy adventure film, cut from the cloth of family friendly fare of that decade, set in that decade, but it's not a film trading on nostalgia as if that alone is worth the price of your ticket or the hour and thirty-nine minute run time. David Robert Mitchell is much more interested in creating the kind of experience those films provided than standing around and pointing at the frame saying, "HEY! REMEMBER HOW COOL THIS WAS?" Instead, he's focused on making a fun, well paced, well made film that hasn't been mashed into bland mush, and isn't afraid to give kids a thrill. The experience was cool, and we can tell stories mining that same emotional territory, without acting as if there was something about the time period that was so unique it needs to be preserved like a collectible.

David Robert Mitchell isn't trying to self consciously mimic or imitate the Amblin films of the eighties, but he clearly remembers how they made him feel, and this is the key to any actually good nostalgic storytelling or art. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor understand the assignment, and they do good work with underlying the way we can take for granted the fact that sometimes part of love is being grateful for the way our differences help create balance in the shared endeavor of making a life.

The End of Oak Street also avoids something which has dominated so much of science fiction, horror and on screen storytelling dealing with the fantastic. It's not interested in creating a mystery box. It's not looking to draw to elicit oohs and aahs at how cleverly it creates some kind of mythology, lore or so on. It's a film meant to be a fun, somewhat thrilling and occasionally startling ride. It's not layering pseudo-science or mystical legends meant to create endless internet chatter and theorizing. It doesn't care about any of that. The only important thing here is a family, dumped into a fantastical situation, trying to survive a series of tense and dangerous events and stay together. Making Anne Hathaway the heart of your film is also a good idea, if the intent is getting people on board for a good time involving characters who are supposed to be average people being chased around a suburban setting by dinosaurs (that's all over the trailers, so it's not a spoiler). For someone as high profile as she is, it's respectable that she's willing to throw herself into this role, in a movie which isn't designed to be a prestige machine, because what ends up on screen is all the better for it. The point here is to get the audience interested in, and sympathetic to the characters enough for there to be some weight, some sense of tension to them being chased by dinosaurs, and Hathaway is a prodigious enough talent to elicit that, without the depth of character in the script that an actor of her profile could demand. It speaks to a broad conception of what kinds of stories are worth telling, and a lack of ego in how those stories advance one's status.

Mitchell's breakout, It Follows, was among the films that helped announce horror was going to be force to be reckoned with in the twenty-first century. One of the strengths of that film was Mitchell's grasp of staging a set piece, pacing and tone. Those are also on display here, and it's good to see he can wield them successfully, in a film that is very different in tone and intent.

It helps that the effects are well done. They don't feel clunky. Visually, they're interesting, and in an age when either the rush to get things to screen or progression of technology creating an increasing clarity of image has seemed to drag digital effects backward, these are quite good.

If, like me, you think there's a place for spectacle driven, original storytelling in theaters that isn't based on already established name brands and intellectual properties that already have time tested fan bases, The End of Oak Street is a good sign. It's also good that David Robert Mitchell is being given the opportunity to demonstrate his range, and not being relegated to one genre, as so many of the people who had a talent for genre films have been in the history of the film industry.