Review: Wife finds a way in the Spielberg-poached dino-mayhem of 'The End of Oak Street'

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Set us as preferred In “The End of Oak Street,” a Michigan suburb is mysteriously blipped into the Cretaceous period and the movie theater teleports back four decades to when a picture like this opened every month.Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway play parents Greg and Denise Platt who live in an idyllic-looking 1982 where the entire cul-de-sac gathers for potato sack races and the public librarian has the nicest house on the block.

Nevertheless, they’re miserable.The family’s rumbles of doom — Dad’s been let go at Chrysler, Mom dreams of divorce — escalate from modest to major when the couple and their teenage kids Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) wake up to discover dinosaurs nibbling on their neighbors.Likewise, the audience is meant to mindlessly munch popcorn.

It’s a tad stale.The director is David Robert Mitchell doing a karaoke cover of “Jurassic Park” and “E.T.” Neither he nor producer J.J.Abrams (of the similar-in-vibe “Super 8”) are ashamed of their thievery in the slightest.

Even Michael Giacchino’s energetic orchestral music is in on the heist, surging with melodies so familiar they tease us to guess which classic John Williams score inspired them.And each time, the notes danced away just before I could snatch the answer from my memory bank.

I felt like the cop who keeps getting hung up on before I could trace the crook’s phone call.Movies If you want big popcorn fare from the best directors in the blockbuster game (Spielberg, Nolan, Ridley Scott), it’s here, along with a number of promising indie swings.Chutzpah-wise, “Oak Street” stands at the border between brazen and cheeky.

If Mitchell’s script wasn’t such a groaner (and the creatures weren’t prehistoric), it would almost satisfy our thwarted hopes for Steven Spielberg’s own “Disclosure Day...