Film reviews: Bridget Jones' latest chapter is thoughtful and richly entertaining

Plus: Heart Eyes is a fun serial-killer-rom-com; Memoir of a Snail is charming and unique animated fare

Renée Zellweger and Leo Woodall in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025) Universal

• Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
• ★★★★☆
• In cinemas

It seems that there are people out there who aren’t fervently wishing that Bridget Jones gets a happy ending, but really, they’re more to be pitied than censured. 

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15A), the fourth outing for Bridget (Renée Zellweger), opens under something of a pall: her beloved husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) has died some years previously, leaving Bridget and her young children Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic) bereft. The early omens are not good: Bridget’s parenting looks a lot like an ineffectual whirlwind drifting about the house, and things turn ominous when the old heart-breaker Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) turns up on her doorstep. 

Happily, Daniel is there to babysit; unleashed once more on the dating scene, Bridget – whilst stuck up a tree, naturally – unexpectedly catches the eye of the Adonis-like Roxter (Leo Woodall), a 29-year-old Hampstead Heath ranger and aspiring biochemist. 

Will Bridget get yet another happy ever after? Adapted from Helen Fielding’s novel by Abi Morgan, Dan Mazer and Fielding herself, with Michael Morris directing, Mad About the Boy is arguably the best Bridget movie since Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001). Always awkward, always endearing, Bridget tumbles from one minor embarrassment to another (there are, inevitably, a couple of big-bum jokes), all the while accidentally charming the chaps with her self-deprecating style. 

The novels’ origins in Jane Austen’s work aren’t neglected, most notably in a tongue-in-cheek homage to Colin Firth’s sopping wet show-stopper in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice; meanwhile, a host of characters from the previous movies have walk-on parts, delivering pithy one-liners as they queue up to offer Bridget emotional support. The big difference here is that this movie offers more than shambolic romance, engaging with bereavement in a thoughtful, insightful manner that is touching without being sentimental, and which develops out of Bridget’s obligation to spend time with her struggling son’s new science teacher, the handsome (and single!) Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Funny and heartfelt in equal measures, Mad About the Boy is richly entertaining. 

Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt in Heart Eyes

• Heart Eyes
• ★★★★☆
• In cinemas

There are as many ways of celebrating St. Valentine’s Day as there are lovers: Heart Eyes (16s) is a serial killer who prefers to go on a murderous spree. Seattle-based marketing bod and recently single Ally (Olivia Holt) has little to worry about, given that the infamous Heart Eyes only targets couples, but then the smouldering Jay (Mason Gooding) walks into her life as a trouble-shooter hired to salvage Ally’s doomed advertising campaign. 

Josh Ruben’s rom-com-horror really shouldn’t work, but the story nails the rom-com essentials – the quirky meet-cute, an undeniable chemistry between the leads, et al – and threads their burgeoning will-they, won’t-they romance through a helter-skelter pursuit as Ally and Jay run for their lives from the crossbow-wielding maniac who seems to have taken the idea of Cupid’s arrows a little too literally. 

Both leads are charming, the script is smart without trying to be clever-clever, and the gags – visual, verbal and musical – come as thick and fast as the gory deaths. As an irreverent alternative to saccharine Valentine’s Day movies, Heart Eyes hits the spot. 

Memoir of a Snail.

• Memoir of a Snail
• ★★★★☆
• In cinemas

Nominated for Best Animated Feature at the upcoming Oscars, Memoir of a Snail (15A) is a stop-motion animation from Adam Eliot (Max & Mercy) that centres on Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), an Australian girl who is cruelly separated from her beloved brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) when they’re orphaned at a young age, only to be taken under the wing of the elderly eccentric Pinky (Jacki Weaver). 

Loosely based on Adam Eliot’s own life (Grace, we learn, aspires to be an animator), the film is an intoxicating blend of foster families, fire-eating, literary classics, Christian fundamentalism, chronic depression and snail-obsession, all of it delivered in astonishingly detailed animation. 

You won’t see anything like it again all year.