Tag: Spielbergian

The End of Oak Street (2026) | REVIEW

The Platt family (L-R: Ewan McGregor, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella, and Anne Hathaway) looking out at a changed world in THE END OF OAK STREET — PHOTO: Warner Bros. Pictures (Still image from tra

Directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows; Under the Silver Lake) — Screenplay by David Robert Mitchell.

I think it’s fair to say that we’ve been treated to an undersupply of dinosaur films since Steven Spielberg and his crew perfected big-screen dinosaur action storytelling with the masterpiece that is 1993’s Jurassic Park. For whatever reason, there haven’t been many attempts to tell new stories with dinosaurs, other than the increasingly threadbare Jurassic sequels. The most notable live-action attempts have been Peter Jackson’s King Kong from the mid-2000s, which I quite like, and Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ quite underwhelming Adam Driver-vehicle titled 65. This summer, we’re treated to another attempt at non-Jurassic World dinosaur-centric cinema. The Warner Bros. picture is the long-awaited fourth feature from It Follows-director David Robert Mitchell, whose last film was the 2018 stoner noir film Under the Silver Lake, which has amassed something of a cult following. I thoroughly enjoyed both his horror breakthrough and his aforementioned cult film, so I can say that I’ve enjoyed every film of his that I’ve seen up to this point. The same goes for The End of Oak Street, which is a terrific crowd-pleaser of a dinosaur summer flick that ticks all the right boxes.

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REVIEW: NOPE (2022)

Steven Yeun’s character looks upward and tries to monetize what he sees in Jordan Peele’s NOPE — Photo: Universal Pictures.

Directed by Jordan Peele — Screenplay by Jordan Peele.

With Get Out and Us, Jordan Peele’s name became synonymous with the social-horror genre. A master of horror on the rise, who is still building his oeuvre, Peele’s films as a director thus far have felt like event films, to me. Get Out was a masterpiece and one of the best films of the 2010s, and Us was a fantastic horror film that I think is exceptionally rewatchable, rewarding, and thought-provoking. He didn’t land all of his big ideas with Us, but it was still one of my favorite films of 2019. I absolutely loved it. So, when his third outing as a director was announced and revealed to be a sci-fi horror flick starring two of my favorite actors of the 2010s in Daniel Kaluuya, re-teaming with Peele after Get Out, and Steven Yeun, who made his name known with The Walking Dead but whose best performance can be seen in Lee Chang-dong’s masterpiece Burning, my expectations reached a fever pitch. So, does NOPE work? In a word, yep.

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