The End Of Oak Street (12A, 99 mins)Verdict: Jurassic lark Rating: Three out of five stars Anyone who goes to see The End Of Oak Street expecting a sci-fi survivalist thriller, which is how it is billed, runs the considerable risk of walking out disappointed.Treat it as a comedy, however, and you might be satisfied. It is frequently, and not always intentionally, hilarious.The frankly bonkers story takes place in 1982 and is set in the kind of provincial suburbia that Steven Spielberg used in ET (which coincidentally, or maybe not, was released in… 1982).Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play Denise and Greg Platt, whose marriage is crumbling. In the basement of their Oak Street home, Denise is secretly writing a novel, thinly disguising her frustrations with her somewhat inadequate husband.Their two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), are aware of their parents’ unhappiness. So what is going to save the marriage and protect the family unit? It couldn’t be the double whammy of time-travel and dinosaurs, could it?Writer-director David Robert Mitchell starts by giving us a familiar depiction of small-town America: marital discord, feuding neighbours, kids on bikes, teenage bullying, all that sort of stuff. But there’s a species of palm tree sprouting up that the local librarian somehow happens to know has been extinct for 200 million years, along with a few other hints that something weird is afoot. And what a foot it turns out to be.Soon, after some kind of cosmic intervention involving dazzling lights, there’s a rampaging triceratops in town. A dinosaur on the loose chases down the Platt children on Oak Street Christian Convery as Brian Platt and Ewan McGregor as Greg Platt in The End of Oak StreetThe entire neighbourhood appears to have been picked up and plonked in another age, in the middle of a prehistoric rainforest with killer raptors everywhere.Mitchell’s credits include It Follows (2014), a modern horror classic, so he knows how to generate spine-tingling tension. Yet all I felt watching The End Of Oak Street was a powerful urge to laugh. The first time we see Greg legging it from a hungry pterodactyl-type creature, which snaps angrily at him… well, I’m afraid I just pictured Rod Hull’s Emu.Anyway, there’s lots of running away and hiding from that slavering, scaly monster best known generically as the d’you-think-he-saw-us, while McGregor gets to exercise his three or four stock expressions, especially that look of consternation he does so well.Hathaway is as reliably fine as ever, taking the preposterous narrative in her stride as she skips into full action mode, lovely neck glistening with sweat and sleeveless top showing off her worked-out arms. Mind you, if you’ll forgive the spoiler, she never meets a dinosaur that can smudge her mascara. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor attend The End Of Oak Street Premiere in Burbank, CaliforniaThere are, needless to add, plenty of echoes of another Spielberg film in all this. The difference is that Jurassic Park made some kind of sense. This really doesn’t. But if you want something to watch over a family-size carton of popcorn, it should fit the bill.Tony (15, 106 mins)Verdict: A bit undercookedRating: Three out of five stars I commend Tony with the same slight caution. It’s basically an ‘origin story’ of the charismatic American chef Anthony Bourdain (who tragically hanged himself in 2018).Matt Johnson’s film chronicles the summer of 1975, with 19-year-old Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) escaping his oppressive middle-class home in suburban New Jersey and setting out for lively Cape Cod in pursuit of a girl he fancies.There, unexpectedly to all but 100 per cent of the audience, he falls in love with cooking instead.Now, as we all know, three stars is the holy grail for chefs but in movie-rating terms suggests a film to be taken with a pinch of salt. Tony is such a film.It is adapted from segments of Bourdain’s riveting memoir Kitchen Confidential but feels undercooked. While perfectly watchable, and enjoyable in parts, it’s rarely as compelling as it could have been. And certain narrative flaws leave, if not a sour taste exactly, a disappointingly bland one. Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain and Leo Woodall as Sal in Tony Matt Johnson’s film chronicles the summer of 1975, with 19-year-old Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) escaping his oppressive middle-class home Still, Sessa (who made his screen debut in the 2023 hit The Holdovers) is excellent as Tony, playing him as a bright, bullish teenager apparently full of swaggering self-belief, yet insecure and impressionable.We first meet him at college applying for a creative-writing fellowship, which he’s convinced he will get, but doesn’t. Yet he still claims to be in Cape Cod as a writer, one of a string of lies woven together in the hope of impressing pretty Nancy (nicely played by British actress Emilia Jones, daughter of Aled).The humdrum reality is a job as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant run by the unnamed ‘Chef’, played by Antonio Banderas, where Tony is soon in thrall to an off-the-rails fellow worker, Sal (the very good, suddenly ubiquitous, Leo Woodall). A chain of formative experiences end with Tony getting the cooking bug, but if you’ve read Bourdain’s book you’ll find this a curiously sanitised version of events, which never evokes the fiery tensions of a restaurant kitchen nearly as well as the hit TV drama The Bear.Moreover, how come nobody acknowledges Banderas’s character is 50 times more handsome than anyone else in town? And why does Chef fall for Tony’s claim that he knows what he’s doing in the kitchen, when it’s clear within five seconds that he doesn’t?Ultimately, the film raises more questions about Bourdain’s life than it answers.Also Showing Sunny Dancer (15, 106 mins)Rating: Four out of five starsMovies about children with cancer need to be very well judged if they are not to seem mawkish. To a pretty short list of those that pull it off, such as Me And Earl And The Dying Girl (2015), we can now add Sunny Dancer.Bella Ramsey, best known for Game Of Thrones, is superb as Ivy, a feisty 17-year-old who, in remission from leukaemia, resents being packed off by her parents (James Norton and Jessica Gunning) to a summer camp in Scotland for kids who’ve had cancer. But contrary to her expectations, she makes friends there and falls in love for the first time. A funny, bold, irreverent, moving film. Earl Cave as Ralph, Conrad Khan as Archie, Bella Ramsey as Ivy, Ruby Stokes as Ella, Jasmine Elcock as Maisie and Daniel Quinn-Toye as Jake in Sunny Dancer Lady (15, 97 mins)Rating: Three out of five starsLady is another distinctly British picture, a ‘mockumentary’ not so much led as swamped by Sian Clifford as ‘aristocracy’s answer to the Kardashians’. She’s Lady Isabella, a narcissist who throws open the doors of her stately home to a camera crew. It’s sometimes very funny, but Clifford’s tour de force gets a little wearing.Holy Days (12A, 101 mins)Rating: Two out of five starsHoly Days is an uneven comedy set in New Zealand about a grieving boy (Elijah Tamati) taken under the wing of three nuns (played by Miriam Margolyes, Judy Davis and Jacki Weaver). Sweet, but flawed.All films reviewed are in cinemas now.