Bridget Jones's Baby (2016)

Bridget Jones's Baby arrives twelve years after the second installment, which is a long time to keep a diary. Renée Zellweger returns from a six-year absence to play a forty-three-year-old television producer who attends a memorial service, sleeps with a stranger in a yurt at a music festival, sleeps with her ex a week later, and then spends the back half of the picture gestating a paternity riddle. The film is directed by Sharon Maguire, who also made the first one. Emma Thompson co-wrote the script and appears as the obstetrician, delivering clinical exposition with the weary precision of a woman who has read the whole thing and has notes.

The cultural inventory here is modest and mostly gentle. Bridget keeps the baby while single, holds down a job, and declines an amniocentesis because she fears the risk, a decision the film treats as sensible instead of saintly. Her mother wins a parish council seat on a platform softened by her daughter, a small nod toward civic engagement that costs the production nothing. Jack, the rival suitor, is a billionaire who built a dating website, and his money is presented as an eccentricity, like owning a boat. Nobody eats him. The London on screen is white, comfortable, and untroubled by anything outside its own postcodes, and the film never suggests this is a problem or a subject.

The film ends, inevitably, as a marriage plot wearing the costume of independence. Bridget spends two hours insisting she does not need a man, then marries one in the final reel while the other cheerfully serves as best man. No sermon is delivered along the way. The pieces simply arrange themselves into the oldest shape available, and the picture calls that a happy ending.