DUBAI: There is something amazingly absurd about watching an entire suburban neighborhood get ripped out of its familiar reality and dropped into a prehistoric nightmare. But in David Robert Mitchell’s nostalgia-tinted “The End of Oak Street,” the dinosaurs are almost beside the point. The film follows the Platt family — Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor) and their two children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) — whose already-fractured family life is upended when their 1980s Michigan neighborhood is mysteriously transported millions of years into the past.

The End of Oak Street is preposterous, but there’s at least one way in which its prehistoric creatures represent a giant step forward.

David Robert Mitchell’s ‘The End of Oak Street’ brings dinosaurs, family drama and suburban chaos together in a wildly entertaining throwback summer...