Pneumonia remains a leading cause of child mortality worldwide, particularly in resource-limited settings where diagnostic tools and expertise are scarce. Recent advances in deep learning offer an opportunity to enhance pneumonia detection through automated analysis of chest X-ray images. This study evaluates the performance of ten state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, including VGG16, ResNet50, DenseNet121, and MobileNetV2, for pneumonia detection using the widely recognized "Chest X-Ray Images (Pneumonia)" dataset. The dataset underwent rigorous preprocessing, including image resizing, data augmentation, and class balancing, to optimize model training and improve generalization. Performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC-AUC were utilized to assess model effectiveness. Among the evaluated architectures, MobileNetV2 demonstrated the best performance with an accuracy of 97.51% and an AUC of 0.9941, highlighting its potential for reliable diagnostic applications. The results also emphasize the trade-offs between sensitivity and specificity across models, offering useful insights for real-world deployment. This study underscores the importance of leveraging deep learning models in clinical diagnostics, particularly in environments with limited healthcare resources. Beyond evaluating models, the findings provide evidence-based recommendations for selecting efficient architectures that balance accuracy and computational efficiency. Future work will focus on integrating multimodal datasets, improving explainability, and validating these models in diverse clinical environments to ensure scalability, trust, and generalizability for global health applications.