Bridget Jones

Oh my, how time flies. Nine years have passed since our last dip into the ongoing diary of Bridget Jones. Said film saw the beloved Brit – invention of Helen Fielding, masterpiece of Renée Zellweger – give birth to a son of two potential fathers.

That neither remain a feature of Bridget’s life, despite co-parenting promise, speaks something to the inconsequentiality of film three. The same cannot be said of four, an altogether more consequential – dare we say weighty? – entry.

Mad About the Boy pairs Bridget’s jolly brand of japery with a greater ear for sentiment and the nuances of time.

Certainly, it mediates rather nicely on what it means to navigate the world as a woman of a certain age…whatever that means in the twenty-first century.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to learn that Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is no longer with us. One needn’t have read Fielding’s original book, the film’s source, to know as much. So shocking was Darcy’s death back in 2013 that the twist was reported in actuality across the tabloid press. Regardless, it is played here for the sucker punch – and wins it. One moment Darcy is there, the next he is not.

Physically, that is. Firth’s presence is fleeting in wispy memory but profound in a more spiritual sense. As things begin, it has been four years since Darcy tragically lost his life on a humanitarian aid mission in Sudan, leaving Bridget as single mother to Billy and Mabel (newcomers Casper Knof and Mila Jankovic). Theirs is a gorgeous but deeply chaotic home.

 all the new domestic dimensions at play, Mad About the Boy remains recognisably Bridget Jones. Much attention, for example, is devoted to a widespread understanding that what Bridget is missing in her life is less Darcy himself than a good shag. God forbid, as Shirley Henderson’s Jude grimly forebodes, that her vagina should literally re-seal itself. How fortuitous it is, then, that Bridget should capture the mind and imagination of two prime for picking suitors. 

Given just how problematic the original Bridget Jones’s Diary now seems to a 2025 audience – the notion that Bridget’s perfectly healthy weight rendered her fat and unlovable was always absurd – there’s something redemptively empowering about a film like Mad About the Boy finally admitting that a mid-fifties Bridget is perfectly eligible for a vibrant sex life. She finds it first in the form of the much younger Rockster, a hunky park ranger played with twinkle by One Day’s Leo Woodall. It’s a tender romance and winning navigation through the lived experience of an age difference, without ever falling fowl of sexist judgement. 

Such is not to say writers Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan steer too far clear of the lowest comic denominator. Great fun is mined from a condom shopping trip and attempts by the youngest Darcy to get her phonetics around the word syphilis. A return to the fray for Hugh Grant, whose Daniel Cleaver was briefly killed off last time around, delivers a constant stream of laughs with his babysitting repertoire – nicely played against an estranged relationship with his own son – including teaching the kids how to whip up the perfect ‘dirty bitch’. There’s joy to be found too in returns for Emma Thompson’s weary gynaecologist and series regulars Sally Phillips, James Callis and Gemma Jones. 

Of course, we know that the equally eligible Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the Darcy-ish teacher and Bridget’s kids’ school, is our lead’s more likely endgame, but such is part of the winsome pleasure. A return to Bridget’s plummy world recalls safer and more wholesome days passed. As comfy as the largest of M&S supportive knickers. Zellweger is terrific throughout, guiding us ably through a life well versed in comic ups and downs, albeit with just a touch more emotional integrity than before.

                    The Wild Robot

A rather lovely vocal performance from Lupita Nyong’o anchors The Wild Robot, which is itself a wholly lovely film. Adapted from the 2014 book by Peter Brown, the film arrives as yet one more hit from Lilo and Stitch director Chris Sanders, who also gifted DreamWorks their How to Train Your Dragon franchise.

In keeping with the studio’s recent move to a more painterly house style, boasted here is a panopticon of sumptuous animation, giving rise to a rusticity in its artistic world building.

Recalled are those classic Disney tales of zany forest critters and Walt’s own interest in the brutal beauty of the natural world. Added is contemporary interest in the rise of artificial intelligence, albeit with more nuance than most.

Nyong’o voices all-purpose house bot ROZZUM Unit 7134, sole survivor of a storm-struck cargo ship destined for markets yonder. Thunderous waves and dark, abstracted clouds – a stunning first shot, no less – have left five others to waste, their steel carcasses washed across a rocky shore. Inadvertently activated by a curious otter, our surviving castaw-AI embarks upon a quest to find herself a customer. It is her programming and entire raison d’etre: ‘did anyone order me?’ This, of course, goes wildly wrong and the perplexed ROZZUM is instead quickly branded ‘monster’ by startled islanders. 

It's a sequence that makes for a lively opener, immediately funny and loaded with sharply drawn slapstick mayhem. There’s vivid imagination, too, in the ROZZUM’s explorative excavations of a vibrantly alive world she was never designed to encounter. Particularly memorable is a gorgeous butterfly encounter but all on the island is and are splendidly rendered. Just wait until the action ascends to skies above.

The culmination of the ROZZUM’s accidental destructions is a bear chase; off a cliff edge and onto an unsuspecting bird’s nest. The goose and all but one of her eggs are instantly killed – the first of The Wild Robot’s brave narrative moves. The sole survivor is an egg carrying a gosling runt, Brightbill, first voiced by Boone Storme and then by an energetic Kit Connor. Roz – as she is latterly renamed – finds herself compelled to care for the orphaned goose, to foster his progression into adulthood and prepare him for the coming migration. It is with a surprising emotional weight that the film posits Brightbill would not have survived had Roz not interrupted the organic flow of natural selection.

It is this interplay of the heartfelt and earthy, the placing of personified wild animals within a real and dispassionate world, that elevates The Wild Robot from cutesy animation to vital experience. Such is not to say that Sanders’ approach is documentarian – Roz co-parents Brightbill with a Pedro Pascal voiced fox – but benefits from a harder edge than most. It’s smart that way. Take the Catherine O’Hara voiced opossum, Pinktail. She’s a world-weary and hugely relatable mum of seven, right up until she isn’t, and only six remain. It’s a deftly handled gag, deliriously funny in execution, but gloriously honest too. Other brushes with realism hit harder but are never cruel and never exceed what a young viewer can handle.

                          The Critic

London, 1934. The Daily Chronicle’s acid tongued theatre critic torments a popular but cripplingly insecure actress via a sequence of cheerfully vitriolic reviews. He is Ian McKellen, she is Gemma Arterton. Together, they elevate an otherwise middling effort from Leap Year director Anand Tucker.

They, and a clutch of tremendously catty barbs in a script from Patrick Marber, making his long overdue return to cinema. Where The Critic boasts strength in the line, however, the wider whole hasn’t half the zest and flavour. 

Jimmy Erskine is not just a theatre critic. Blessed with a verbose gift for vocabulary, Erskine is a four-decade serving stalwart of the Chronicle and favourite of its rampantly right-wing editor. Moreover, Erskine is also a raging and unabashed homosexual at a time when to be such was to be a criminal of the first order. Not that this fazes the great writer himself. Not in the least. Indeed, Erskine’s apparent indifference affords him the luxury of living with his lover

and secretary – Tom (Alfred Enoch), while seasoning their relationship with regular sex from a park prostitute. Erskine is known for liking it ‘rough’.

It’s not entirely clear why Erskine takes so fervently against Arterton’s Nina Land, whose stage presence neither seems to warrant either the popular adoration nor critical lambaste. For her part, Nina has concern only for Erskine’s judgement. It was reading his musings on the art of theatre that first inspired Nina to perform, after all. In the here and now, however, there is no longer joy for Nina in such reading. ‘Over the last ten years,’ she bemoans, ‘you’ve compared me to livestock, creatures of the sea and an extinct bird’. This, in the wake of a particularly grisly hatchet job, in which Erskine derides Nina as being a ‘wet blanket’ with a ‘fat arse’.

is in excavating the relationship between star and critic that Tucker finds his film at its most compelling. Nina’s desperate need to please intensifies with each new review but negativity from the Chronicle appears to have little bearing on her commercial success and the flow of roles ferried her way. In consulting Erskine – itself a curious manifestation of a conversation that rarely occurs in real life – Nina learns of the root of his negativity. Erskine does not, ostensibly, dislike Nina but experiences profound disappointment each time she fails to meet his exacting expectations. Woe betide those who fall short of Erskine’s image of a very particular little England.

And yet, in probing this dichotomy, The Critic itself disappoints. Too soon, opened questions are abandoned. There is an understanding here that actors crave the critic’s approval but untouched is the reverse of the dichotomy. Why does Jimmy write? Is it pure pleasure or revenge for the career he could not sustain.

Unfazed, McKellen maintains his share of the fizz throughout, devouring the dramaturgical opportunity to embrace Erskine’s increasingly malodorous inclinations. Arterton, too, flourishes with performative ostentation as Nina falls into accelerating despair. Tucker has less fortune in capitalising on the potential of his wider ensemble, with Lesley Manville, Romola Garai and Mark Strong all underused. To that end, his is a two-hander that transitions to chamber piece without really getting to the nub of either

                    Disney’s Snow White 

Somewhere between ‘poisoned apple’ and ‘fairest of them all’ lies a more nuanced assessment of Marc Webb’s Snow White than that widely available online. The film may not quite achieve irrefutable greatness but there’s certainly nothing here so insidious as to warrant the torrent of bad press that currently haunts the film. Snow White is, by all accounts, perfectly pleasant. It’s well cast, vibrantly hued and rousingly scored. In a Disney remake canon that also includes Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio and 2016 stinker Alice Through the Looking Glass, this one does nice business.

Of course, Snow White has always courted skepticism. It was not for nothing that Walt’s 1937 original was gifted the moniker ‘Disney’s folly’ by contemporaries. And yet, by virtue of a certain clarity of vision and morality, the tale endures. In some respects, Snow White is almost too well known for the remake treatment. It’s no mean feat for Web and company to excite the imagination when the tune and beat are so well versed

Even with modernising revisions from screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson – Snow needs no Prince to save the day and is now named for the blizzard she was born in, rather than the colour of her skin – it’s familiar stuff, stretched twenty-odd minutes with new songs and a little more effort in the romancing department. True love must earn his kiss. It’s a consent thing.

Rachel Zegler – Spielberg’s Maria – is 2025’s Snow White, bringing the same sort of effortless enchantment that Lily James delivered Kenneth Branagh for 2015’s Cinderella and rather more gumption than Adriana Caselotti’s original princess. Zegler’s Snow White still wishes on a well but with a mite more frustration than was the case ninety-eight years ago. An opening sprawl expands upon the original in depicting the passing of Snow’s mother (Lorena Andrea), her replacement by a new Queen (Gal Gadot) and the disappearance of her father (Hadley Fraser) to fend off supposed threats to the southern lands. Snow is left to servitude with her wicked stepmother stealing all joy from the kingdom on usurping the throne.

If Zegler is living her best princess life, dancing through the glades and charming the birds from the trees, this is nothing on the whale of a time being had by Gadot. The one time Wonder Woman chews through the castle scenery with camp abandon as her Evil Queen bedazzles the screen in a series of loud Sandy Powell gowns. If there’s a sequin left in Pinewood, it’s fallen from Gadot, whose musical number proves a veritable rampage. This is ‘All is Fair,’ one of six new songs penned by Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Zegler’s big number – ‘Waiting on a Wish’ – may prove a little rote but there are some catchy tunes amid the rest. Real Broadway vibes. Successful updates to ‘Heigh-Ho’ and ‘Whistle While You Work,’ meanwhile, deliver a pair of thoroughly enjoyable set pieces.

 

               Despicable Me 4

Despicable Me peaked with Silas Ramsbottom. Not the Steve Coogan voiced character, per se, but the sequence of his jowly introduction.

Was it Kevin, or perhaps Bob, who looked furtively to his neighbouring minion and sniggered ‘bottom’, before bursting into unbridled laughter? Either way, a gag of all time greatness was born.

Nothing else in the, now fourteen-year-old, franchise has ever matched such infantile brilliance, certainly not in such a way as to justify the astounding commercial success the series has achieved. $4.6bn and counting. Film four does little to break the mould, instead opting for gentle expansion. It’s bright, breezy and a little exhausting.

The Ramsbottom gag gains a brief reprise early in Despicable Me 4. It’s when the man himself, in a pleasing example of built-world continuity, comes a knocking to whisk Gru (Steve Carell) and the nuclears off to a safe house in willowy suburbia. An old archenemies has broken free of his, supposedly high security, prison and, for the most brilliantly pathetic of reasons, has the destruction of Gru at the top of his to do list. It’s right up there with shoring up his army of diddy, identikit cockroaches and using a device of his own invention to transform himself into a human cockroach. He is, quite transparently, a bit of a letch. You’ll pick up on even before you hear the outlandish faux French accent he’s gifted by Will Ferrell. Anything goes in a world where no one questions Gru’s own mangled pronunciations.

More so than before, echoes of Pixar’s The Incredibles – and its own sequel – reverberate here. What with the power-trip villains, retro future aesthetic and familial dynamic, there’s always been a degree of crossover, but it’s never felt so blatant. Gru, and wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), now have a baby of their own, a cutesy brothers for seemingly ageless sisters Margot (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Polan). Known mainly as ‘the baby’, Gru Jr.’s the spit of both Jack Jack Incredible and Gru himself, with whom he shares a tepid relationship. Familiar that it may be, it’s the father-son journey here that raises the bar of the wider film. It’s almost touching.

There’s potential too in the film’s witness protection shtick, leaning into the very same play pen enjoyed by WandaVision over on Disney+. This too would have worked well in series format. Of course, Gru and family bring a trio of Minions along for the ride, one of whom spends the entire film trapped in a vending machine, but theirs remains an endearing family set up. Assigned new identities, Gru becomes solar panel salesman, Chet Cunningham, with Lucy renamed Blanche and deployed as a hairstylist. A nice ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ frisson plays out with the neighbours, while the need to not stand out proffers obvious tension. It’s enough to power the film on its own

 

                      

Fly Me to the Moon

The world changed forever in July 1969. Or, perhaps, it didn’t. If you go in for that sort of thing. An extraordinary number of people still do it would seem, with conspiracy no less ripe in 2024 – six human moon landings later – than fifty-five years ago. Possibly more in the age of rampantly untempered social media. It’s from such cynicism that Fly Me to the Moon fuels its launch into limited ambition. The film started out as a streaming project and will prove circular in that regard. Certainly, there little extra to the terrestrial here.

When looking, for instance, for era-spiration, Fly Me to the Moon leans closer to small screen stylings of Mad Men than the dramatic weight of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, against which its Neil Armstrong (Nick Dillenburg) feels comically inadequate. The role’s a small one. The real star is, instead, Scarlett Johansson’s savvy-chic Kelly Jones, a marketing maestro brought in to rejuvenate NASA’s floundering Apollo space program. From Draper’s New York to Kennedy’s Florida at the behest of none other than Richard Nixon. Or, at least, one of his shadier agents, Woody Harrelson’s Moe Berkus. He’s almost convincing.

The appointment comes much to the chagrin of Channing Tatum’s buttoned up Cole Davis, a man whose scarred past haunts a present overseeing the latest Apollo mission. Number 11. Yep, the one that will see Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin fly to and land on the moon. Not that any one here knows that success lies ahead. Across the Pacific, the Soviets lead the Space Race thus far, with the film playing heavily into its socio-political ramifications. Actually landing on the moon is, in this context, less valuable than the perception that the feat has been achieved and what this means in the ranking of global superpowers.

 Such demands that Kelly, when not charming senators and securing lucrative brand deals for NASA, oversee the production of a fake moon landing. A back up, should the legitimate one go the way of Apollo 1. As there’s no sense here that the production actually believes the angle – there’s a tongue-in-cheek nod the Kubrick conspiracy – it’s herein that any last vestiges of gravitas are allowed to slip into orbit. Except, it’s more damning even than that. Much as the pay off gag works – just about – the tonal shift, from screwball bounce to abject betrayal, feels a rug pull to the film’s erstwhile efforts. The real mission to the moon, we can invest in. Trite flippancy and blunt satire are a sell even Kelly would struggle with.

That’s not the only issue here. There’s also the matter of Johannson’s excellence. Indeed, so vibrantly charismatic is the gigawatt star’s screen presence throughout the film, that everything else, everyone else, feels lacking. It’s as stark as Dorothy’s Kansas to the technicolour of Oz. Tatum, particularly, misses. Where a script by Rose Gilroy calls for Davis to be strait-laced, Tatum plumps for straight-jacketed. Greg Berlanti shoots dull cinematography with a staid solemnity and against an uninspired soundtrack of familiar ebbs and flows.

                Lee

     

In the same year Kirsten Dunst took her name as tribute for Alex Garland’s Civil War, seminal mid-century photojournalist Lee Miller receives the biopic treatment, courtesy of Ellen Kuras’ succinctly titled directorial debut. Set between 1937 and ‘45, bookended by a flirtation with ‘77, Lee charts Miller’s journey to the heart of the Second World War and her excavation of the damage it reaped. Her images remain as potent now as ever they were. If not so extraordinary in its own execution, the film warrants credit for the pains it takes stress quite why Miller alone could have taken them

To similar ends, Lee owes its own existence largely to the strident efforts of a visibly passionate Kate Winslet, who leads the film as Miller herself. An eight year production, including two weeks in which Winslet paid the wages, is a gruelling achievement. Given such a lengthy gestation process, one might expect the film to have secured a stronger foundation beneath its subject’s skin. And yet, for all the eminent watchability of Winslet throughout the film – she is, indeed, terrific – her Miller feels rather too performative. Lee’s Lee is acerbic, damaged and deceptively intuitive but more catnip for a fine actor than rooted character study. 

Perhaps that’s something of the point. Certainly, Josh O’Connor’s framing interviewer struggles to crack the shell. To enquiries as to the role and significance of her photos, 1977’s Miller offers only dismissal. They’re just pictures. Far less than a trip forty years prior suggests. One does not career through an active war zone simply to the end of just pictures. Indeed, our first sighting of the younger Miller finds her stumbling through Saint Malo, over rubble and to a backdrop of all too active dust. A claustrophobic soundscape pulls Miller’s rasping breaths into sharp focus, punctuated by thumping heartbeats. Fear is hot across her face. There is no room for doubt as to what lengths she will go to capture the visual truth of the changing world around her.

Kuras takes us further back still. Back to an age of sun kissed somnambulism, or so it seemed to Miller and her band of Parisian artiste amigos, and a world stumbling into a second Great War. A topless spar with future husband, Roland Penrose, takes Miller to London and to the door of British Vogue. Recruited as a war photographer, having formerly modelled on the other side of lens, Lee’s odyssey into the continent is powered more by her sheer force of nature than the whims of a dated establishment. There she will unite with fellow photojournalist David Scherman, a Jew in Hitler’s Europe and impressively portrayed by Andy Sandberg, in his dramatic debut. It is Scherman’s experience of Buchenwald and Dachau, so earnestly delivered by Sandberg, that gifts the film its most powerful instance. His reaction to Miller’s now infamous bathtub shoot – in Hitler’s own apartment and unknowingly taken moments after his death – the film’s most wicked.