BRIAN VINER reviews Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy: A tearjerker that's v.v. funny - and the best Bridget since the original

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (15, 125 minutes). Verdict: A tearjerker that also makes you laugh out loud. Rating:. She’s back - and while some people might wish she wasn’t, because after all she’s not everyone’s glass of Chardonnay - she’s back with bells on. The fourth Bridget Jones film is the best since the 2001 original, and aptly enough is the most grown-up of the quartet, exploring bereavement and grief but never at the expense of wit and charm.

It explores plenty of other stuff, too, not least romance across a mighty age divide. For decades, mainstream cinema only tackled that in terms of older men and sirens half their age. Now, post-MeToo, it seems to be the other way round: Nicole Kidman and Anne Hathaway have both recently played women who fall into bed with chaps young enough to be their sons, and here it’s the turn of 55-year-old Renee Zellweger.

This film’s other title character is played by Leo Woodall, star of TV dramas The White Lotus and One Day. He is 28. She’s back - and while some people might wish she wasn’t, because after all she’s not everyone’s glass of Chardonnay - Bridget Jones is back with bells on. Zellweger gives her usual thunderously mannered performance as Bridget. But again she pulls off the trick, somehow, of making it engaging.

The Olympian haplessness, the daft pratfalls, the comedy walk that is all but a waddle, they’re all firmly in place. But she is still emblematic of many aspects of womanhood. Zellweger’s skill, and that of writers Helen Fielding, Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan, is in moving Bridget (who incidentally is meant to be 47, not 55) credibly on to a new phase of life. She is a widowed mother of two now. It is four years since her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) - a stiff human-rights lawyer strongly rumoured to be based on a certain Keir Starmer (though Fielding, Bridget’s creator, remains mischievously evasive on the subject) - died on a humanitarian mission in the Sudan.

We see him sporadically, both in flashback and as a kind of ghost, in his family’s imagination. Bridget and her primary school-age kids, Billy and Mabel, live amid chaotic middle-class clutter in affluent Hampstead, north London. The comedian Arnold Brown used to have a great routine about Hampstead’s ineffable middle-classness, suggesting that even people who live in council houses there have council houses in Wales they go to at the weekends.

This film’s other title character is played by Leo Woodall, star of TV dramas The White Lotus and One Day. He is 28 and plays dishy young park-keeper Roxster. This film mines the same rich seam, relentlessly satirising the complacency of the area’s yummy mummies and their high-earning husbands. It’s a bit like shooting fish, or maybe taramasalata, in a barrel. But it is no less funny for it. There is no man in Bridget’s life. Her old flame, the incorrigibly roguish Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant on fine form), is still around, but she’s much too old for him now. She has become, he tells her, ‘effectively a nun’.

Her Netflix password is ‘allbymyself47’, despite her presence on the dating site Tinder, on which her TV presenter friend (Sarah Solemani) has set her up as ‘tragic widow needs sexual awakening’. But then, on Hampstead Heath, she meets a dishy young park-keeper called Roxster (Woodall), and soon, to the delighted bemusement of her old pals, they are an item. There are several uproarious scenes, one of which sees Roxster stripping down to his underwear to rescue a dog from a swimming-pool.

His heroics are accompanied by Dinah Washington’s song Mad About The Boy while Bridget’s middle-aged friends look on, tongues practically hanging out. I took my grown-up daughter (who’d barely started school when the first film, Bridget Jones’ Diary, came out) to last month’s world premiere, and she had to suppress hysterical laughter more than once, especially when a lip-serum injection goes badly, hilariously wrong.

Her old flame, the incorrigibly roguish Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant on fine form), is still around, but she’s much too old for him now. She has become, he tells her, ‘effectively a nun’. But director Michael Morris (whose experience is mainly in television, on the majestic Better Call Saul among other hit shows) ensures that these comic set pieces do not interrupt the narrative flow, which also has Bridget apprehensively going back to work as a TV producer.

Nor does the comedy stop us believing in the characters, who include an earnest but kindly science teacher sweetly played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Even more importantly, the poignancy of two young children coming to terms with their father’s death feels real. Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is that rare thing, a tearjerker that also makes you laugh out loud. Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy opens on Thursday across the UK.