Bridget Jones returns after 12 year absence in joyful new film

Released: September 16 (UK & Ireland)

As creative pregnancies go, Bridget Jones's Baby has taken longer than most to come full-term.

It's been 12 years since Renee Zellweger adopted a near-flawless English accent to portray the hapless singleton in Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason.

In the interim, writer Helen Fielding has delivered a third novel, Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, but it's her series of newspaper columns from more than a decade ago that fertilizes this haphazard, yet joyful stumble into motherhood.

The third film throws a warm, affectionate and frequently hilarious baby shower for characters we've grown to love and proves that Bridget may have (finally) dieted down to her target dress size, but she's no closer to achieving her Happy Ever After.

Director Sharon Maguire, who helmed Bridget Jones's Diary, and her clucky trio of screenwriters, which includes co-star Emma Thompson, are in a celebratory mood.

They bookmark the heroine's trials and vacillations with nostalgic flashbacks to earlier films reminding us of Bridget's infuriating obsessions and her fitful romantic dalliances with Colin Firth and Hugh Grant's paramours.

"I'm trying not to think I'm past my sexual sell-by date," laments Bridget, as she careens at high speed towards her 43rd birthday without a wedding ring on her finger.

She works as a producer at Hard News alongside old boss Richard Finch (Neil Pearson) and newscaster pal Miranda (Sarah Solemani), who suggests a hedonistic girls-only weekend at a music festival.

The gal pals descend on a muddy field, which Miranda pithily describes as "Sodom and Gomorrah... with tofu".

A late-night blunder into the wrong yurt leads to a spontaneous coupling with a handsome American love guru called Jack Quant (Patrick Dempsey).

A few days later, Bridget is powerless to resist the silky charms of old flame Mark Darcy (Firth), who is separating from his wife.

A pregnancy test at work confirms that Bridget is about to gain weight. If only she knew who was the father...

Bridget Jones's Baby opens with a blast of the heroine's preferred anthem of self-pity - All By Myself - before a choice expletive kicks her out of a fug and the plot into first gear.

Zellweger slips back into the title role with ease, oozing lovability, fragility and regret as she wonders how to broach the subject of paternity with her two suitors.

Dempsey and Firth are attractive rivals for Bridget's brittle affections and the script keeps us guessing as long as possible about the course of true love.

Set-pieces including a tussle with a revolving door are genuinely hysterical and Thompson nabs several of the best lines as Bridget's despairing obstetrician, including a zinging one-liner that advises expectant fathers against witnessing the miracle of birth firsthand.

Ignorance, like Maguire's rumbustious film, is bliss.

:: SWEARING :: SEX :: VIOLENCE :: RATING: 8/10

BLAIR WITCH (15, 89 mins) Horror/Thriller/Romance. James Allen McCune, Callie Hernandez, Brandon Scott, Corbin Reid, Wes Robinson, Valorie Curry. Director: Adam Wingard.

Released: September 15 (UK & Ireland)

In 1999, low budget horror The Blair Witch Project conjured a perfect storm.

Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez passed off their chilling work of fiction as bona fide found footage and convinced some audiences that three student filmmakers had perished in the Black Hills in Maryland.

Handheld camerawork induced motion sickness, festival audience members fainted and the filmmakers milked each nugget of publicity with ghoulish glee.

It was a masterclass in marketing.

Shot under a veil of secrecy under the fake title of The Woods, director Adam Wingard's belated sequel retains the same stylistic conceit as more ill-fated students venture into the woods to discover if the legend of the witch is real.

Since the release of the original film, savvy audiences have been bombarded with imitations so it would take a miracle for Wingard to catch lightning in a bottle again.

He comes close with a couple of sequences of nail-biting suspense, including a subterranean crawl that begs you to watch through your fingers.

However, there are only so many times you can see characters charging noisily through undergrowth in the dead of night, twitching with terror in close-up at each rustle of leaves, before tension dissipates.

For more than 20 years, James Donahue (James Allen McCune) has been haunted by the disappearance of his sister Heather, whose chilling final moments were documented in footage from October 1994 that became The Blair Witch Project.

James is convinced she is alive and his suspicions seem to be confirmed by shaky handheld footage posted on a video sharing website by username Darknet 666.

"If there's any chance I can find out what happened to her, I need to try," James tells his girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is making a documentary for a class project.

She packs recording devices and a drone and heads to Burkittsville with James and their good friends, Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid), in order to rendezvous with Darknet 666 aka oddball Lane (Wes Robinson) and his girlfriend Talia (Valorie Curry).

The couple believe wholeheartedly in the legend of the Blair Witch and forcibly persuade James and his pals to let them join the expedition.

Ignoring a sign which reads, "No entry after nightfall", the group treks into the woods with flashlights and camping gear.

Blair Witch is a solid and unsettling genre piece that falls short of the dizzying, gasp-inducing terror that heralded a phenomenon in 1999.

The introduction of modern technology adds nothing to the fear factor.

Indeed, a prolonged sequence with a drone up a tree is a superfluous deviation from plausibility.

Jump out of seat scares are delivered at regular intervals and a frenetic denouement nods to the past and pries a creaky door ajar for future sequels.

:: SWEARING :: NO SEX :: VIOLENCE :: RATING: 6/10