Bridget is back! The fourth outing for Helen Fielding’s legendary Londoner is landing in cinemas as an early Valentine’s Day gift and the people are ready. Advanced ticket sales have outstripped even those for the all-conquering Barbie last year.
The Bridget Jones films to date have mirrored the books in charting Bridge’s Chardonnay-and-cigs early days as a singleton living, working and dating – in relatably messy fashion – in the London of the noughties, teens and now 2020s.
What is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy about?
Renée Zellweger returns to the role for a fourth (and likely final) time to find Bridget struggling with grief after the death of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and parenting their two kids is a separate rollercoaster of emotions. Encouraged by Shazza and the gang, she’s getting back ‘out there’ only to find the world of dating, Tinder and all, is unrecognisable. Enter hunky, tree-loving twenty-something Roxster (One Day’s Leo Woodall) with the promise of new love. But can it last?
Is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy good?
The critics’ verdicts are in and the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. ‘A total delight’ is Deadline’s judgment. ‘It’s the comedy of British middle-class embarrassment, executed here as deftly as anything in peak Richard Curtis,’ raves The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. ‘Like me, you may be surprised by how much you’ve missed it.’
‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: The Best Sequel of the Bunch Deserves More Than a Streaming Release https://t.co/MGuoouRXeI
— IndieWire (@IndieWire) February 12, 2025
Time Out hails Mad About the Boy ‘comfortably the best Bridget Jones outing since Bridget Jones’s Diary’. ‘Renée Zellweger is sensational,’ enthuses The Independent. ‘[It’s] a heartfelt, charming return to the chaos surrounding the one and only Bridget Jones,’ says Empire. ‘You might even shed a few tears.’
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a front-to-back delight. A romcom about grief and starting over with heavy boots but a light heart, full of great gags and Renée Zellweger hitting Shirley MacLaine-in-The-Apartment levels of excellence pic.twitter.com/Zvia0qUFks
— Phil de Semlyen (@PhildeSemlyen) January 28, 2025
The Guardian is less charmed by the film. ‘The jokes have been dialled down to accommodate a contrived and unconvincingly mature “weepie” component but the film becomes sad in the wrong way,’ writes critic Peter Bradshaw.
Collider, meanwhile, calls it ‘a saccharine gimmick to get divorcées into cinemas’.
Decide for yourself when the film lands in cinemas worldwide Feb 13. If you’re in the US, you can catch it on streaming on the same day.
Read Time Out’s review of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
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