Four Small Openings, One Very Big New Film This Week

The new films this week ask you to pick between a suburban street dropped into the age of dinosaurs, a narcissistic aristocrat who hires a camera crew to follow her about, a Sanskrit epic that runs five and a half hours, and a nineteen-year-old Anthony Bourdain scrubbing pans in a Cape Cod kitchen. All four landed in British and Irish cinemas on 14 August. Almost nothing links them beyond the date.

That scattergun quality is what mid-August looks like now. The summer tentpoles have had their fortnight, the awards contenders are still sitting in Venice and Telluride, and distributors use the gap to push out the odd, the small and the very long. This week the gap produced a studio creature feature, a British mockumentary that premiered at the London Film Festival last October, a restored 1989 art-house monument and an A24 biopic about a man who wasn't famous yet.

Which matters, because the choice is not really between four films. It's between four completely different evenings out — one of which will eat most of your Saturday.

Dinosaurs Turn Up on a 1980s Cul-de-Sac

The End of Oak Street is the big one, in scale if not in ambition. David Robert Mitchell — who made It Follows and Under the Silver Lake — sends a slice of 1980s suburbia somewhere prehistoric after a cosmic event, and leaves a family to work out how to survive it. Ewan McGregor plays the meek husband, Anne Hathaway the more capable wife, with Maisy Stella and Christian Convery as the children. It ran under the title Flowervale Street for most of its production.

Reviews have been warm rather than reverent. Screen Daily called it a fast, fun creature feature; the Hollywood Reporter was blunter, filing it under high-end trash done with style. The Irish Times gave it four stars and singled out how Mitchell rations his monsters.

Mitchell learns the signature lesson of Spielberg's Jaws and initially reveals his monsters with finesse.

An Aristocrat, a Film Crew and a Slow Unravelling

Lady is the outlier and probably the one people will still be recommending at Christmas. Samuel Abrahams directs, co-writing with Miranda Campbell Bowling, and Siân Clifford — Claire from Fleabag — plays Lady Isabella, who invites a struggling documentary maker, played by Laurie Kynaston, into her country pile to record her every move. It starts as class comedy and does not stay there.

Ninety-five minutes, limited release, and a critical reception that has been unusually consistent across Time Out, Little White Lies and Sight and Sound. The Irish Times reckons it will pick up a cult following and reaches back to Viv Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson End for a comparison, which tells you roughly how strange it gets. It premiered at the London Film Festival on 16 October 2025 and is distributed by MetFilm.

Why the New Films This Week Include a 1989 Epic

Peter Brook's The Mahabharata is the reason to check listings carefully. Brook staged the Sanskrit epic as a nine-hour theatre piece in 1985, then filmed it with Jean-Claude Carrière and Marie-Hélène Estienne, drawing a cast from sixteen nationalities — Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Andrzej Seweryn, Sotigui Kouyaté, Jeffrey Kissoon, Georges Corraface and, yes, a young Ciarán Hinds.

The restoration returned to Venice in 2024 and is now touring the UK under the London Indian Film Festival banner. The BFI issued the triptych cut on Blu-ray on 10 August, running 332 minutes — between Brook's three-hour cinema version and the six-hour television edit. Put differently: it's longer than three screenings of The End of Oak Street back to back. Brook died in 2022, so this is as close to a definitive version as anyone will get.

The Bourdain Film That Skips the Famous Part

Tony, from A24, is Matt Johnson's follow-up to BlackBerry, and its smartest decision is what it leaves out. There's no Kitchen Confidential, no television career, no 2018. Instead it's the summer of 1975 in Provincetown, where a teenage Bourdain washed dishes in a seafood restaurant. Dominic Sessa plays him, with Emilia Jones, Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall and Dagmara Domińczyk. It runs 106 minutes.

Deadline described the portrait as a young man who lied freely to impress people, which is a braver note to hit than most biopics manage. The Irish Times, at four stars, calls it fond and modest and praises it for dodging the usual origin-story machinery.

How to Choose Without Wasting the Weekend

If you're bringing children along

The End of Oak Street is the only realistic option, and even then check the certificate at your own cinema — it carries a 15A in Ireland while the American rating is PG-13, so classification varies more than the marketing suggests. Booking a matinée on a wet Sunday is the sensible play.

If you want the one nobody else has seen

Lady, and soon, because limited releases in Britain often mean a two-week window before the film vanishes to streaming. Independent venues including the Barbican have it programmed. This is the title most likely to be sold out and least likely to be re-run.

If you've got a whole day

The Mahabharata, but treat it as an event rather than a night out. Screenings are scattered, they're often ticketed with intervals, and the Blu-ray is the fallback if nothing is playing near you.

What to Watch Next

Keep an eye on how The End of Oak Street holds up in its second weekend. Original studio science fiction with no franchise behind it lives or dies on word of mouth, and a soft drop would make Warner Bros far likelier to greenlight the next one. Meanwhile, check the London Indian Film Festival tour dates before assuming Brook's epic will come to you — restoration tours rarely reach beyond the bigger cities, and this one won't wait.