Welcome to the realm of “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” “King Kong,” and a host of other movies that revel in the doom of cities, all featuring bewildered humans trying to understand why wild animals have suddenly grown into enormous seeds of destruction.

In “Rampage,” the enemies of serenity are an albino gorilla, a Rocky Mountain wolf, and an Everglades alligator, each of them turning into giants of furious terror.

The set-up is 1950s-style old-fashioned. An American spaceship explodes and litters the U.S. with debris containing a laboratory experiment concocted, weirdly, in a Chicago skyscraper. There’s a scam afoot to make money, but greed becomes a foolhardy scheme when everything turns to collapsing glass and steel.

Your local heroes, scattered across the land, are zoo worker and gorilla whisperer Dwayne Johnson (looking bulked-up enough to burst), scientist Naomie Harris, and government agent Jeffrey Dean Morgan. They’ll begrudgingly function together battling to prevent downtown Chicago’s complete decimation.

“Rampage” roars along like a freight train, faltering only once in a corn field of too much exposition. Then it’s back to madness as director Brad Peyton goes batty for bellicosity and delivers the mayhem.

The U.S. military is locked and loaded for bear, or in this case, gorilla, wolf, and alligator.

“Rampage” is too intense for young children – although the bird’s eye view of one villain being devoured is a winner for adults and teens. Tiny touches of humor abound. It’s a crowd-pleaser in the way few monster movies are.

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FINDING YOUR FEET: The British have a delightful way of taking a slices of complex lives and turning them into engaging, clear-eyed movies. Sixty-something Sandra has her quiet, long-term marriage upended after her husband cheats on her. Finding herself alone and bewildered, she flees her comfortable suburban surroundings for her social activist sister Bif’s house in London.

Sandra soon realizes that she needs to rethink her deeply-felt emotional self and develop a willingness to recapture the things that once made her happy.

Bif (a realistic Celia Imrie) has a group of friends, including Jackie (a witty Joanna Lumley of “Absolutely Fabulous”) and Charlie, a fellow who lives on a houseboat (a sweet-natured Timothy Spall), all of whom find camaraderie taking weekly dance lessons. New friendships become vital to Sandra’s rebirth and, of course, there’s a big dance competition, in, of all places, Rome, Italy.

With the bittersweet “Finding Your Feet,” director Richard Loncraine juggles a large cast well. Screenwriters Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft keep the dialogue tightly-focused as Sandra, wonderfully acted by Imelda Staunton, considers the possibility of rectifying marital mistakes. The music, some of it classic rock and roll, is fun to hear, and the film’s story arc is perfect.

An idyllic Rome looks alluring, the gentle laughs are character-oriented, and the surprising final shot is a romantic comedy winner.

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ISLE OF DOGS: Writer-director Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” is one of my favorite movies. The sweet comedy is the closest we’ve had to zany Marx Brothers bedlam in years. I’m also especially fond of Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited” and the animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox. His sense of humor is off-beat. His comedy rises from situations that are often slightly unmoored.

Anderson returns to animation with “Isle Of Dogs,” a fable that satisfies at the same time as your delight in its charm wobbles. The 101-minute movie is too long for what it delivers, but what it delivers often borders on the magical.

In the future, dogs are banned in Megasaki City, Japan by Mayor Kobayashi because of an outbreak of “snout fever.” 750,000 happy pets and homeless critters are sent to Trash Island, a hellhole of rotting garbage. The island is a literal wall of stench and misery. The animals discover that a deliverer may have arrived in the form of a young man named Atari, the mayor’s foster nephew, who has stolen an airplane to search for his beloved dog Spots.

A group of dogs, all with unique personalities of their own, will assist Atari on his mission, and the colorful adventure proceeds from there. In the overcrowded city, students at a high school newspaper learn that scientists have a cure for “snout fever.” However, the mayor and his media underlings have suppressed the news.

“Isle Of Dogs” is a visual and aural masterpiece. The animation is magnificent and the pulsating Japanese drum music is glorious. The beautiful movie floats aloft on ideas and situations that are slightly overworked and overextended, but it’s still something worth experiencing.

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BEIRUT: Here’s a clever spy film that involves a burnt-out operative played by Jon Hamm, who, in 1982, returns to the Beirut, Lebanon of past bad memories as a wearying civil war swirls around him. He’s called upon to represent a secretive segment of the U.S. government in negotiations with a mysterious element of a Lebanese faction to facilitate the return of a kidnapped American. Murkiness and duplicity abound.

In “Beirut,” the action is fast and on-edge because director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Tony Gilroy have pared away any unnecessary elements that usually hamper films like this. Rosamund Pike co-stars in this well-acted and furiously fast thriller, which offers a fresh take on familiar deeds carried out in the darkness of the hidden corners of a chaotic city.

Michael Calleri has been reviewing movies professionally since 1990 and in his lifetime has seen more than 10,000 films in theaters and through other sources. If he had to choose the films of one director with which to relax, they would be Alfred Hitchcock’s. He can be reached at moviecolumn@gmail.com.