The End of Oak Street: A complete mess

The End of Oak Street (2026) • View trailer

TURKEY: No stars (out of five); rated PG-13, despite considerable violence and gore

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.16.26

This film fails — jaw-droppingly — on every level.

 

The premise is ridiculous, poorly rationalized, and fails to maintain internal consistency. The main characters are inadequately conceived, one-dimensional stick figures that lack even enough depth to be considered clichés. The so-called “acting” ranges from risibly burlesque to line readings so wooden they warp.

 

All hell breaks loose, once the folks on Oak Street realize that — somehow, improbably —
their entire neighborhood has been dumped back in time, to the Jurassic Period.

Rarely have talented name actors — Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway — been handled so poorly by a director, although the blame isn’t entirely theirs. Nobody could have done better with the eye-rollingly awful dialogue in writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s so-called script.

I don’t understand. Back in 2014, Mitchell lit up Hollywood with It Follows, a smart, scary and genuinely original little shocker that frightened the Jujubes out of viewers.

 

What happened to that guy?

 

He sure isn’t anywhere to be seen here...

 

The year is 1982. Events begin during a lively block party in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. Greg and Denise Platt (McGregor and Hathaway) and their children — teenage Audrey (Maisy Stella) and adolescent Brian (Christian Convery) — are introduced gaily participating in a sack race. Family dog Starbuck watches from one side.

 

Ah, but — behind the scenes — all is not well in the Platt household. Greg uncharacteristically works odd jobs and drinks too much; Denise is writing a novel that reflects her own unhappy marriage; Audrey and Brian worry their parents will divorce.

 

Starbuck tends to poop in the back yard of next-door neighbor Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne), a Mr. Crankypants who threatens to shoot the dog if it happens again. (One suspects he won’t last long, when things go south.)

 

Brian pals around with three friends. He always carries a toy bow and arrow. (This would have made sense in the mid-1950s, when boys his age were part of the pop culture Davy Crocket/coonskin cap craze, but in 1982? It’s ... weird.)

 

The next couple of days are mostly uneventful. Brian and his pals spot a new girl in town (Jordan Alexa Davis, as Jeannette). They speculate whether she attends a private school. One of Denise’s neighbors shares a strange plant that sprouted overnight in her back yard. While Denise tries to determine what it is, the local librarian examines her photograph and immediately identifies it ... as something that has been extinct for millions of years.

 

(That’s an impressive bit of trivia, to have at the tip of her tongue.)

 

Late that evening, the night sky explodes with a thundering roar and blinding flash of light, and the power goes out. Assuming a blown transformer, they bunk together in the living room. The following morning, the power still is off; so is the plumbing. The basement is flooded, and the ambient temperature is warmer than usual.

Beautiful Boy: Descent into drug hell

Beautiful Boy (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and graphic drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.18

This film is highlighted by quiet, extraordinarily powerful little moments.

Director Felix Van Groeningen often is wise enough to simply hold his camera on stars Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell, and they never disappoint. Chalamet, in particular, is a fascinating study, his character’s intelligent glow gradually dimming as this morose story proceeds.

Having already watched his son Nic (Timothée Chalamet, left) relapse repeatedly,
despite numerous stints in detox and rehab, David Sheff (Steve Carell) wonders
if things will be any different this time.

Unfortunately, the film as a whole disappoints.

Stories that trace the downward spiral of drug addiction are of a type, and it’s hard to bring any freshness to a narrative with beats that are both inevitable and familiar: the initial descent and personality shift; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Van Groeningen and co-scripter Luke Davies deserve credit for trying to adjust the recipe, and it’s somewhat novel to view so much of this saga from the viewpoint of those who represent collateral damage: which is to say, the helpless family members. On the other hand, the constant flashbacks become irritating, even confusing. While it makes sense for David Sheff (Carell) to remember the cheerful, jovial kid his son Nic once was, at times it’s difficult to know whether a given scene — with Nicolas (Chalamet) as a young adult — is in the “present,” or the not-quite-present.

The story definitely gets additional dramatic heft from its real-world origins. Sheff is a widely celebrated journalist and author whose résumé includes work for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Fortune and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Van Groeningen and Davies’ script is adapted from Sheff’s best-selling 2008 memoir of the same title: a painfully raw account of dealing with Nic’s addiction to methamphetamine.

The script also draws from Nic’s version of events, in his book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.

Difficult as it is, to watch this film at times, Van Groeningen and Davies chose not to include some of the books’ even bleaker events. Which probably is just as well.

Although Chalamet has the “showier” role, Carell’s David is the story’s focus. His is the more challenging acting job, since David most frequently reacts in response to Nic’s behavior. Carell’s face is a constant study in pain: haunted gaze and slumped posture, burdened by weary desperation. Rarely has the phrase “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders” seemed more apt.

It’s natural to expect that if this saga includes a life-changing epiphany, it’ll belong to Nic; after all, the options are sharply etched. Either he kicks the habit, or he dies. But the crucial moment of dawning realization — a genuinely heartbreaking scene — actually belongs to David: when he finally, reluctantly, despondently realizes that he can’t fix this.

We’re reminded of the “three Cs” during an Al-Anon meeting that takes place toward the end of the film: You didn’t cause it; you can’t control it; you can’t cure it. Impossibly difficult to accept, for a parent accustomed to being a child’s full-time protector.