Bridget's back and good

Bridget Jones is back, and she's fatter, funnier and more foolish than ever. Three years on, she's become a globetrotting James Bond of romantic misadventure.

It's been a fine year for sequels, and Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason - like Shrek 2 and Spider Man 2 - is even better than the original. I confidently predict it will be the biggest British hit of all time - an outstanding romantic comedy, with no fewer than three performances that deserve to be regarded as classics.

Renee Zellweger is, quite simply, adorable. She has created in Bridget a truly wonderful comic creation: someone who, for better or worse, epitomises an entire generation.

I saw the film with an audience of whom 80 per cent were females in their 20s and 30s, and never have I felt such a wave of love and empathy from an audience towards a single character.

From the moment she sings a dopey version of The Sound Of Music on top of Primrose Hill, she has us in the palm of her chubby hand. And as her selfdestructive insecurities, awful dress sense and breathtaking lack of social skills threaten her perfect, four-week-old relationship with her 'human rights lawyer and total sex god' Mark Darcy, she offers an even more highly credible view than Shrek 2 of what can go wrong with a relationship after the partners have walked off into the sunset.

Zellweger received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress for her last performance as Bridget. Here, she's even better.

Her English accent is more consistently accurate, and her use of embarrassed British body language in the kind of costumes that would make Trinny and Susannah reach for the smelling salts is consistently hilarious.

She reveals an unexpected talent for slapstick that recalls the heyday of Lucille Ball.

Hugh Grant is equally superb as the clever, charismatic, eternally unreliable love rat Daniel Cleaver, who claims to have been in therapy for sex addiction ('I hug people who smell') but remains randy enough to mount a telling counter-attack on Bridget's wobbly virtue in, appropriately enough, Bangkok and Phuket.

Other things happen to Daniel, too, that suggest Grant has an ability unique among movie stars to laugh at himself and his own offscreen frailties.

It's hard luck on Jude Law's Alfie that he should have to do battle at the box office with a mere supporting character who's so much sexier and more topical than he is.