It's New Year's Eve and Bridget Jones (Zellweger) finds herself once more at her parents' house preparing to attend the neighbours' annual event.

Bridget, 32, is horrified when her mother presents her with a most grotesque red outfit to wear but she doesn't really care because the only people to see her there will be stuffy old fogies.

She's wrong. Mark Darcy (Firth) is also in attendance at his mother's behest and appears to be suffering the same woes as Bridget.

His knitted reindeer sweater, though fetching, was obviously not of his own choosing.

So you would think that Bridget and Mark might hit it off straight away as the only humans under the age of 60 at the party - but no.

As with everything else in Bridget's life she succeeds in messing up her chat-up line and ends up offending the handsome barrister and alienating him forever.

Bridget's office romance is going along the same route. Her boss - the deliciously dastardly Daniel Cleaver (Grant) - flirts madly with her when she wears a short skirt but has no interest in Bridget's dreams of commitment.

Altogether Bridget's life is in a mess. She still drinks too much, cannot for the life of her cook a meal and is on a perpetual failing diet.

Helen Fielding's hilarious accounts of the traumas of ill-behaved boyfriends and cellulite filled the columns of a weekend magazine before becoming a book and ultimately a Hollywood movie.

Texan actress Renee Zellweger is faultless as the middle-class British career woman who works hard but actually wants nothing more than to find romance and the perfect body.

Armed with Chardonnay, fags and a king-size bar of chocolate, Renee is so convincing that the Academy of Motion Pictures even nominated her for a best actress Oscar.

The ensemble cast, particularly Grant and Firth, recreate the atmosphere of chaos, insecurity and too much red wine which dominates the lives of so many 30-somethings in London.

So real and so funny is this portrayal that most of the laughs will come from flickers of recognition in Bridget's erratic and often hysterical behaviour.

Natalie Stone