Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor) wants to go back in time to the days before his marriage soured — the days when he still had a full-time job and his comfortably middle-class Michigan family was the picture of 1980s suburban Americana. His wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) wants her delusionally optimistic husband to face the reality that things aren’t working between them — to recognize that it can’t be all barbecues and potato sack races in the local cul-de-sac forever, and that the Platts are being confronted by a genuine crisis. Both parents will get their wish in David Robert Mitchell’s wildly fun “The End of Oak Street,” as the film is only a few minutes old before the Platts’ entire neighborhood is worm-holed 250 million years into the past and beset by a Jurassic world of very hungry dinosaurs. I’ve never been so grateful that humanity has invented Zooming with a couples therapist for an hour every Wednesday.

A crowd-pleasing but winkingly mean-spirited Amblin homage that perfectly captures the sweet menace of movies like “Gremlins” and “The Goonies” (so perfectly, in fact, that it almost feels like you’ve been sucked through a hole in space-time yourself), “The End of Oak Street” is what multiplexes have been missing from recent summers: Lean, clever, original, cheer-at-the-screen entertainment that will traumatize 10-year-olds for life and make their parents feel like they’re kids again. The sight of Anne Hathaway dressed in a denim co-ord and blasting a bloodthirsty Allosaurus in the face with a shotgun fixes that absence real fast. Universal’s big dinosaur franchise might be steered by the guy who founded Amblin, but any five-minute stretch of this film — the biggest surprise of a summer that’s delivered on all fronts — offers more thrill and wit than the folks at InGen have been able to manufacture in total over the last three decades. Not bad for a blockbuster that also takes the time to stop and play Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” in full, or close to it.

Before zagging in a very different direction with 2019’s “Under the Silver Lake,” Mitchell began his career by establishing himself as one of millennial cinema’s most insightful surveyors of suburban unease. Both the somber warmth of “The Myth of the American Sleepover” and the inescapable dread of “It Follows” were dependent upon the isolating disquiet of a middle class idyll; on the pervasive sense that community, and the illusion of safety that it offers, is often less effective at keeping us safe than it is in revealing how we’re all on our own in the end. With a budget roughly eight times the size of his previous films combined, “The End of Oak Street” is obviously a different kind of David Robert Mitchell film than anything he’s made thus far, but his fetishes and fascinations have survived the studio process intact, and his Warner Bros. debut hinges on the same kind of “alone together” apprehension that defined his first two indies.

Despite running a punchy 99 minutes and being paced like a masterfully engineered roller-coaster, “The End of Oak Street” takes ample time establishing its emotional tenor. The characters in Mitchell’s script are simple, to be sure, but they’re also lived-in and deeply felt. That starts with Greg, who secretly moonlights as a pizza delivery guy after losing his job, and will do whatever it takes — egolessly, and with a smile on his face — to continue projecting the image of a stable family unit. Fraught with the gendered failure of being able to provide for his wife and their two-point-five kids (a star is born in pet dog Starbuck), McGregor’s tender performance fights an unspoken war against emasculation, a war that finds him grasping onto patriarchal self-image in a pair of tighty-whities and performatively clutching a baseball bat as he runs into a lawn overrun with prehistoric monsters. 

Denise, similarly dying inside, has a secret of her own: She’s been sneaking away to the basement typewriter and banging out a transparently autobiographical novel about a mom who splits on her family in search of a more exciting life. Continuing her Hall of Fame-worthy year, Hathaway seethes with the well-earned resentment of a wife who’s forced to start every argument because her husband refuses to acknowledge that anything’s wrong. 

The couple’s teen children can sense divorce in the air, but they’re too preoccupied with their own dramas to focus on that. Carl Sagan-obsessed Audrey (“My Old Ass” star Maisy Stella) is dealing with the fact that her parents can’t afford to send her to Cornell, while her pubescent younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is crushing on the new girl next door — to unpredictably hilarious effect — while trying to avoid a serious ass-beating from a local bruiser. Stella is an established pro, but both actors playing the Platt kids bring home the kind of unvarnished believability that’s key to distinguishing Mitchell’s thrill-ride from the gloss of pre-digested Hollywood slop. 

Every member of the family is fighting a battle their relatives may not even know about, but soon they’ll all be running for their lives together. Cut-to-the-bone but never feeling the least bit slashed to ribbons by studio notes, “The End of Oak Street” ramps things up with confidence; a weirdly tropical climate settles over Flowervale St. after some deafening booms and flashes of light, and the next thing the Platts know their neighbors are being eaten alive by packs of feathery CGI theropods (Mitchell’s dinosaurs are older and more bird-like than the ones from “Jurassic Park,” striking a balance between realism and spectacle that’s cartoonish enough to be fun but convincing enough to be scary). 

The movie has a great time unleashing its wide variety of ancient beasties on the little boxes of late 20th century suburbia, as Stegosauruses leave giant piles of fertilizer on well-manicured lawns while a massive snake-looking thing curls up inside an inflatable pool, and flying Pterosaurs feast on dead human bodies in the streets. Mitchell makes it clear early and often that “The End of Oak Street” is going to push its PG-13 rating as far as Amblin classics once pushed their PGs, not just in the movie’s liberal approach to blood, but also in the unsparing glee of its cruelty; the first dino-related death we see is a guffaw-worthy shot across the bow to anyone who thought Mitchell was going to play nice, though his script eventually finds a satisfying way of having its cake and eating it too. 

“The End of Oak Street” is led by its characters every step of the way (an emphasis that allows Mitchell to follow the film’s most brutal moment with a very funny character beat that manages to ring even more true for its discordance), as the crucible of not becoming Jurassic food inevitably brings the Platts closer together. Neighbors might be left to fend for themselves when the shit hits the fans, but the nuclear family — once hopelessly siloed apart despite the illusion of solidarity that comes from sharing the same house — finds real strength in itself when extinction comes knocking at the door. 

Compelling as it is to see Mitchell project his pet themes onto an IMAX-sized screen, however, “The End of Oak Street” is primarily concerned with playing its audience like a fiddle, and even the most auteur-inflected aspects of its design are ultimately in the service of providing a great time at the movies. Indeed, Mitchell takes enormous pleasure in reminding his audience of where they are and what that means, whether through his deployment of expertly calibrated tropes (P.J. Byrne does a great riff on the asshole-next-door archetype, while “Gilmore Girls” alum Emily Kuroda, playing the gentle neighborhood librarian, gets a cheer-worthy moment good enough to compete with the Flash Entering the Speed Force), his wanton use of throwback film language (slow zooms are a staple of Mitchell’s repertoire, but when was the last time an entire shot/reverse-shot conversation scene was filmed with a split diopter?), or his tight assortment of shout-out-loud setpieces that all build on each other for maximum delight. The action may not boast quite the same level of heart-stopping ingenuity as the kitchen scene from “Jurassic Park,” but “The End of Oak Street” gets a lot nearer than most, and one bit — another kitchen misadventure — manages to slither within a fang’s reach of Spielberg at his best. 

The movie never loses control of its amusement park tone, but Michael Giacchino’s zippily instructive score would be there to put things back on track if it did; the first music cue switches from upbeat wonder to ominous portent and back again in the span of just a few seconds, as if to say “buckle up for something that’s fun and exciting, but always safe enough that you never really have to get scared.” It’s the same promise the suburbs have always made, the only difference being that “The End of Oak Street” is actually able to keep it. Nostalgic without being at all reactionary, Mitchell’s riotously crowd-pleasing blockbuster takes both of Greg and Denise’s conflicting wishes to heart. Yes, it wants to go back in time — not to prove that the past was a better place, but rather to remind us that it can still be present in all the ways that matter.

Grade: A-

Warner Bros. will release “The End of Oak Street” in theaters on Friday, August 14.

Former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner are set to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for more than $12 billion, a record price for a professional sports franchise, ESPN reported Wednesday.

“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Iger and Kushner said in a joint statement. “Our long-term commitment is to build on that foundation, compete at the highest level, and serve this extraordinary team, its fans, and the city of Los Angeles.”

The pair will acquire the Lakers from Mark Walter, who became the team’s majority owner last year.

The deal marks the second time the Lakers have changed hands in less than a year. The NBA approved Walter’s purchase of a majority interest from the Buss family last October in a deal that valued the franchise at $10 billion. Jeanie Buss remained the Lakers’ governor following the sale.

“Owning the Los Angeles Lakers has been one of the great honors of my life — an extraordinary investment, but what I will carry with me is the community, the fans, and a city that treats this team as family,” Walter said in a statement. “The Lakers belong to Los Angeles, and I have every confidence the best is still ahead.”

Iger stepped down as Disney CEO earlier this year and subsequently returned to Kushner’s Thrive in an advisory role. He previously served as a venture partner at the firm between his two stints leading Disney.

Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, also acquired a controlling stake in Angel City FC in 2024, giving the former Disney chief an existing foothold in Los Angeles professional sports.

Iger and Kushner had also been eyeing a bid for a potential NBA expansion team in Las Vegas, TheWrap previously reported. The pair had been working with investment bankers on a potential offer through Thrive Eternal, a holding company established by Thrive Capital, before pivoting to the Lakers, according to ESPN.

Kushner founded Thrive Capital in 2009 and is also the co-founder and vice chairman of health insurer Oscar Health.