'Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy' Is the Best One Yet

There’s a whole generation of women who grew up with Bridget Jones. We read Helen Fielding’s popular novels. We watched the movies. We followed Bridget (Renée Zellweger) as a single woman in her thirties, obsessed with her weight, counting her cigarette and alcohol intake, struggling with her career, and not always making the best choices about her love life. We read endless stories about how Zellweger gained 30 pounds to play the title character.

Now nearly nine years after Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third movie in the franchise, Zellweger is back in Bridget Jones: Mad About About the Boy,  along with Colin Firth as Bridget’s beloved Mark Darcy, Hugh Grant as the charming and dastardly Daniel Cleaver and Emma Thompson as hilariously understanding but exasperated Dr. Rawlings. Like the women who grew up reading her, Bridget is now older, slightly wiser, and facing the twists and turns life brings.

Spoiler alert for those of you who somehow avoided the news that first broke when Mad About About the Boy was published in 2013: it begins with the revelation that Bridget’s husband, Mark, was killed four years earlier when he was on a humanitarian mission in Sudan. Fret not, Firth's cameos (albeit in ghost form) now exist only in Bridget’s memory; he is more perfect than ever. (Anyone who has seen this scene in Pride & Prejudice would not disagree with this take.)