Film reviews: Ant Man and the Wasp, Teen Titans go To the Movies and more…

ANT-MAN AND THE WASP ★★★★✩ (12A, 118 mins)

Director: Peyton Reed

Stars: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Peña, Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, Michael Douglas

If you’re one of those annoying people who loudly point out plot holes in films (someone casually hopping out of a taxi without paying usually has me at it), you should appreciate the winking wit in Ant-Man And The Wasp.

The tiny superhero’s second solo movie offers everything that I wished for from his too-straight 2015 debut. After all, why cast great comic actors if you’re not going to milk every laugh?

Now everyone is playing in their chosen position.

Rudd deadpans some very salty one-liners, the manic Michael Peña has two funny rambling monologues and the special effects team are crafting punchy, size-based visual gags.

The first film introduced us to Rudd as Scott Lang, a retired cat burglar and divorced father-of-one who was recruited by Michael Douglas’s Dr Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man from the comic books) to wear his size-altering suit.

Most of the time, it makes Scott small enough to hop on the back of a flying ant but occasionally it malfunctions and makes him a lumbering giant.

The film’s standout action scene, a chase in San Francisco, uses this scale-swapping setup in a variety of ingenious ways.

One minute, tiny Scott is getting a beating from a goon’s windscreen wipers.

The next minute, he’s pounding the pavement with one giant leg while riding a pick-up truck like a kiddie’s scooter.

The plot isn’t quite so straightforward.

We begin with Scott serving the final days of his house arrest for fighting against Iron Man in Captain America: Civil War.

Hank recruits him again because he thinks Ant-Man can rescue his wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) who has been stuck in the psychedelic world of the “quantum realm” since the 1980s.

The veteran boffin thinks Scott forged a psychic link with Janet when he “went subatomic” at the end of his debut film, and with the help of his daughter and Ant-Man’s new romantic and crime-fighting partner Hope – aka The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) – has built a quantum gateway.

“Do you guys just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?” Scott asks.

But of course, there are villains to throw quantum spanners in the works.

A black marketeer (a slightly underused Walton Goggins) wants to steal Hank’s lab, which the so-called genius scientist has shrunk down to the size of a suitcase.

The other main villain is The Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a figure from Hank’s past who had her molecules jiggered about by a failed experiment.

She blames Hank for her misfortune and wants his lab so she can stop looking like an old double-exposed photograph.

Then there’s stressed-out detective Jimmy Woo (a very funny Randall Park) who is rightly convinced Scott has found a way to slip his ankle monitor.

As Scott needs to stay out of trouble for the sake of his daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson), he has to make sure he’s home whenever the inspector calls.

Compared to the apocalyptic plots of the Avengers films, the stakes are low and fans will have to wait for a mid-credits teaser to discover how this nonsense ties together with the shock ending of April’s Infinity War.

But a change of scale was precisely what this bloated franchise needed.

Ant-Man may be Marvel’s smallest superhero, but he delivers some very big laughs.

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TEEN TITANS GO! TO THE MOVIES ★★★★✩ (PG, 88 mins)

Directors: Peter Rida Michail, Aaron Horvath

Stars: Scott Menville, Hynden Walch, Khary Payton, Tara Strong, Greg Cipes, Will Arnett

A sense of fun also seems to be creeping into the dark world of DC Comics’ film division.

After spoofing their gravely-voiced Batman twice in Lego, it feels like they’ve let off a big enough waft of steam in Teen Titans Go! To The Movies.

Based on a Cartoon Network show, this frenetic animation features a gang of teenage superheroes who are desperate to star in their own movie.

Sadly for leader Robin (voiced by Scott Menville), his crew – Starfire (Hynden Walch), Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), Raven (Tara Strong) and Cyborg (Khary Payton) – are more interested in performing cheesy, inspirational song and dance routines than fighting crime.

So he’s delighted when he thinks he has found an “arch-nemesis” in Deadpool-like Slade (Will Arnett).

Smaller children will probably laugh the loudest at an early fart gag but geeky adults should appreciate some surprisingly sharp industry satire.

In a scene at a film premiere for the latest DC movie (“Batman, Again”), Robin excitedly watches the trailers hoping to see an announcement of his own solo movie.

The Boy Wonder watches in horror as Batman’s car and utility belt are getting their own spin-offs.

The icing on the cake is a trailer for a film about Batman’s butler Alfred, “The Ultimate Grime Fighter”.

This would be funny even if you hadn’t read that the producers of spin-off TV show Gotham really are working on a spin-off, spin-off show about Alfred.

How much you laugh at the rest of it will depend on how well you know your comic books. I almost spat my popcorn at a parody of Stan Lee’s movie cameos.

This may be aimed at children, but it’s a lot smarter than DC’s supposedly grown-up films.

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SICILIAN GHOST STORY ★★★★✩ (15, 118 mins)

Director: Fabio Grassadonia, Antonio Piazza

Stars: Julia Jedlikowska, Gaetano Fernandez, Corinne Musallar

FANS OF scary movies may feel a little cheated by Sicilian Ghost Story, a stylish Italian art-house drama about a real-life horror story.

It is based on the 1993 kidnapping of Sicilian boy Giuseppe Di Matteo, 12, who was held by the Mafia for 779 days in an attempt to silence his “supergrass” father.

The two directors of this powerful film add romantic and fantasy elements to the story and show his disappearance from the viewpoint of a fictional classmate who has a crush on him.

They invite you to take the word “ghost” in two ways.

Guiseppe (Gaetano Fernandez) is a metaphorical spirit in the sense that he haunts the people in his village who are too afraid to acknowledge his disappearance.

There is no community search party and the case gets little attention from the police. A besotted and increasingly frustrated Luna (Julia Jedlikowska) fights this silence by papering her village with posters saying, “Giuseppe has disappeared, and what are you doing about it?”.

At times, she sees him in visions and is directed towards clues about his disappearance by dreams.

Fairytale tropes keep cropping up, too.

Luna’s quest to find Guiseppe takes her into dark forests, sinister clearings and caves.

Shots of a ruined pagan temple remind us of Sicily’s role in Greek mythology.

Real monsters have ruled this island for centuries, filling the island with ghosts and feasting on the spirit of the living.