Pacific Rim

Monsters from another dimension invade Earth through the ocean floor, and humanity invents an army of huge robots to fight them. Director Guillermo del Toro and his co-writer Travis Beacham indulge their inner child, the one who always wanted to dress up in a Godzilla costume and kick the bejesus out of an elaborate scale-model city. In the process, they give other kids of all ages a movie for their guilty-pleasures list (the older, the more the guilt, but the pleasure's still there). It's like the fights in King Kong vs. Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Megalon, but with a CGI grandeur those 1960s Japanese filmmakers could only dream of. (Or, for that matter, Michael Bay, whose Transformers movies were never this much fun.) Charlie Hunnam, Rinko Kikuchi and Idris Elba acquit themselves well amid the mayhem.