Nostalgic pop culture doesn’t need to feel like we’re watching a limp corpse being puppeteered around the room. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street reminds us of this, delivering palaeontological chaos of the Spielberg variety. It’s entertaining as hell and silly when it needs to be, without sacrificing too much of the disaffected cool-kid style of the director’s previous, adult-orientated output – namely It Follows (2014), a horror haunted by suburban decay.

The End of Oak Street is not only better than any of the Jurassic World films, but so much less stiff and fetishistic than the exhaustive line of Eighties “love letters” produced by Stranger Things’s Shawn Levy and his ilk. It also sees Anne Hathaway extend her formidable 2026 run (that also includes Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey), acting up such a storm you wonder why those dinosaurs don’t just turn tail in fear and run.

The premise behind Mitchell’s script is simple. A suburban American neighbourhood in 1982 – home to Hathaway’s Denise, her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), their two kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and their Australian cattle dog Starbuck – ends up, via some improbable pseudo-science, transported to the prehistoric era. The couple are on the verge of divorce, meaning he’s stashed a secret bottle of whiskey in the garage and she’s furtively writing a novel about abandoning her family and starting a new life. Naturally, they find such issues fairly easily resolved when a pack of Coelophysis start rooting through their garbage and tossing the neighbourhood cats around like frisbees.

It’s about as traditional a cinematic conflict as you can get: the suburban norm upended by strange existential threats; the violent destruction of mythical American innocence. Yet Mitchell finds clever ways to bend it to his will and modernise a few of the rustier parts. There are oddly affecting scenes of sobbing teens self-soothing with pop music (Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” still hits, even if you just watched your neighbour be pecked to pieces by Pterosaurs), and a wonderfully written bit of queer representation.

The End of Oak Street works well as an homage to the films made by Spielberg’s production company Amblin – among them Jurassic Park, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and Poltergeist – not purely because it’s packed with material reminders of the past, or because Michael Giacchino’s score is essentially “wonderment” refined. It’s because it manages to capture something of their imagination, the creative freedom often absent in works of pure imitation.

Mitchell’s film can be absurd, sentimental and, at times, violent and merciless – to a degree that starts to push up against its 12A classification. There’s an artfulness to its camerawork (the necessary exposition scenes are livened up with some classy split diopter shots, where both the foreground explainer and the background listener are kept in focus) and an elegance to the way editor John Axelrad stitches together action scenes.

People die in humiliating fashion. We watch dinosaurs bump uglies and eat ice cream. Hathaway, laser-beaming sincerity out of those big, brown eyes of hers, brings such pathos to the stock character of disenchanted housewife that she seems to gain more dimensions every second she’s on screen.

Yet, Mitchell also allows something more raw, and more distinctly modern, to creep in (and not just because the dinosaurs are here correctly depicted as feathered). It’s a mildly bleaker film for bleaker times, and he’ll let the camera linger, for example, a few seconds longer on the sight of a neighbour’s body lying face-down on their kitchen floor, a pattern of bright-red dinosaur footprints leading out the backdoor.

It’s enough to ensure that, even when we’re watching people trying to escape a vehicle being stomped on by a 900lb extinct reptile, The End of Oak Street feels original and exciting and not, to borrow a little internet lingo, like Jurassic Park’s “reheated nachos”. It’s one of the best films of the summer. And it didn't even have to star Tom Holland and Zendaya.

Dir: David Robert Mitchell. Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery. Cert 12A, 99 minutes