It’s a great time to be an Anne Hathaway fan. You can’t go anywhere without seeing her. She’s as present as air. She’s had a whopping four movies released so far in 2026, with a fifth, the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, on the way in October.
If you’re sitting at home looking for a movie to watch, you’ll see her face all over Disney+ for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Go to the cinema right now, and you have not one, but two different options with Hathaway. She’s been getting endless acclaim for her role in The Odyssey, and this weekend she’s the lead in David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, a film on the other side of the tonal spectrum.
(She was also in Mother Mary, in which she’s luminous, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting about it).
Of her wide array of 2026 performances, her role as Penelope in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the one getting all the attention. The experts at GoldDerby, a site that specializes in awards predictions, unanimously predict a Supporting Actress nomination for Hathaway for her performance, and the majority predict a win.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s great! She’s terrific in The Odyssey. But there’s a problem. It’s not her best role this year!
What is her best role, you ask? That would be The End of Oak Street, where she plays a suburban mother in the ‘80s whose life is thrown into complete chaos when dinosaurs suddenly take over her neighborhood. Yes, I’m serious!
The film has a fun, silly concept. Mercifully, The End of Oak Street is irony-free, and totally sincere in the delivery of its dinosaur world.
But the biggest reason the movie works at all is that Hathaway’s performance makes you believe it.
It’s easy to imagine someone else taking on a role and making something of a joke of it, lacing their line deliveries with a knowing wink, as if to say to the audience: isn’t this silly? But Hathaway makes you completely forget she’s an actor. Here, she is Denise, a mother to two kids, and now she’s forced to fight for the life of herself, her children, and her husband, as dinosaurs descend on her picture-perfect suburb.
Denise is a complicated person. She longs for a life outside of her family. Her relationship with her husband is on the rocks, and she’s written a book that imagines her running away to freedom. A lot of Denise’s feelings aren’t conveyed in dialogue, but rather in Hathaway’s eyes.
At a glance, we can see the joys and the heartbreak of a woman who, on the surface, has so much but, deep down, is struggling to feel as if she has anything at all. The dinosaurs throw everything into perspective for her, and she quickly remembers how deeply she loves her family and how ferociously she fights to protect them.
And man, does Denise go to (literal) war (with dinos) for them.
The Odyssey is the film with more dramatic heft, but Oak Street is the trickier part. It’s jam-packed with chase scenes, dinosaur fights, and attempts to figure out how in the hell to get their world back to normal. It’s harder to truly, deeply connect with your audience when you’re running around and wielding your shotgun at various dinosaurs than it is to grieve your missing husband. One of these is a universal feeling; the other is being chased by dinos.
Through all the wanton madness, Mitchell wisely gives Hathaway the space to be jaw-droppingly brilliant, and she’s especially Oscar-worthy in three scenes.
In the first, the family sits in their home, trying to process what’s happening to them. Mitchell uses a split diopter shot to get an extreme close-up on Denise, tears streaming down her face as her daughter looks terrified behind her. Here, you can feel just how terrified Denise is. It’s an extremely relatable moment in this adventure—how would you react if your family was plunged into this terrifying scenario? If you’re anything like Denise, you’re completely devastated, but not defeated. There’s a glint in Hathaway’s eyes that suggests she’s ready to do anything to keep her family alive, and it’s extremely inspiring.
The next is a moment of complete levity. Denise and her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) come across two dinosaurs having sex. It’s totally absurd, yet thanks to Hathaway, it provides the couple an opportunity for genuine catharsis. Here, she’s incredibly charming and sensitive. In this scene, you can see the loving, joyful woman she was before the dinosaurs, and it gives her space to be goofy.
“I want to remember this crazy, stupid moment,” she says, and you can feel the anguish she’s experienced drift away, if only for a second. It’s stunning.
In the third, which I won’t spoil, Hathaway’s character witnesses something truly blood-curdling. Mitchell’s camera doesn’t focus on the event, but rather on Hathaway’s face. It’s the ultimate showcase of her talents. The actress looks so utterly shaken that she could fall to the ground and crumble, but instead she’s fiercely resolved and more determined than ever to protect her family. It’s a scene that crystallizes her as the ultimate action star.
So yes, The Odyssey is great. But if you really want to see Hathaway shine brightest, you’ll find that in The End of Oak Street. Let’s hope The Academy votes to give her an Oscar for it.
