Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025)

With little attachment and minimal memory of the characters, I watched Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy with the deck stacked against it. I didn’t yet know the credits would feature a nostalgia-bait slideshow of highlights from the original films, but I could tell this new entry demanded institutional memory. I recognized faces from other shows—like the Finnish Prime Minister from VEEP—but who they were to the titular Bridget, I could not fathom. The whole thing exhausted me, so much so that I stopped watching. Twice.

I’m glad I returned to it. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is every bit the rom-com you’d expect, full of zany antics, wish-fulfillment fantasy, and bold declarations of love uttered intimately in falling snow, but it’s simultaneously a wise film that meditates on grief. With several truly profound moments, this is not some legacy sequel cash-grab. It’s a warm, reassuring film about aging, losing, and growing.

Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) long ago became Mrs. Darcy, but Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) has died, leaving Bridget to raise their elementary school-aged son and daughter alone. She has help, including the womanizer Daniel (Hugh Grant), whom she once fancied, but there’s a hole in her life. When her support system cajoles her into action, soon she’s producing a talk show, volunteering at the school, frolicking with the much younger Roxster (Leo Woodall), and resisting what might be interest from her son’s stubborn science teacher, Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Regarding the rom-com bonafides, the fourth Bridget Jones movie qualifies as funny, although more smile-and-nod than laugh-out-loud. Bridget’s monologue gravitates between engaging and distracting, but Zellwegger nails this distant look while staring at her late husband's image in her mind: there’s so much warmth there it’s haunting. Per usual, Bridget ends up in compromising positions in public, but each instance ends warmly. That is, the film is generous to our heroine.

It’s also generous to its audience: over and over, it nails the small stuff. Bridget dates in a modern world here, and while she calls herself a Luddite, the film never lets her play dumb. Bridget is whip-smart, so she learns the lingo, integrating modern vocabulary knowingly rather than cringingly. Trust me—that’s an achievement.

 

But it’s not just the legitimately well-written dialogue. There’s a scene at a talent show near the end wherein the family’s nanny, an invited guest, records a notable performance on her phone, and it makes perfect sense for a character written to be almost cruelly thoughtful. That character—Chloe, played by Nico Parker from 2024’s Suncoast—is a minor one who appears in maybe four scenes, yet she’s consistent from start to finish. Everything is like that here. I could tell the film had me when a relationship’s dynamics shifted suddenly: rather than grumble, I interpolated for the movie, imagining absent interstitial moments to smooth its rockier lurches. I overlooked flaws because it had earned my affection.

Despite its focus on grief, I would still call Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy a romantic movie, but maybe not in the way you’d expect. True, there’s romance in Bridget’s two dalliances, but I’d argue that this is a romantic film about community. We always find Bridget surrounded by people who love her, care about her, and prioritize her wellness. Those eclectic personalities do indeed yield hijinks, but there’s this hardy current coursing through the film endorsing company as the cure for what ails the heart. The cynic in me wants to bristle at such warmth that even the ghosters return to apologize, but I adore the message. The requisite Cupid bits are fine, but the joy of a fourth Bridget Jones flick is visiting all those we met before and discovering they all remain in our protagonist’s orbit.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy might be a lot for those dealing with grief, loss, and mourning, but I’d consider it an excellent candidate for so-called “cinema therapy”. This isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s a really good one.

And not just for a legacy sequel, either.

Atropia (2025)

 

The first movie I saw in theaters without any adults was The Truman Show. Matt and I spent an ungodly sum on food and then gave the rest to donation collectors from the Roy Rogers Foundation. That was an iconic movie for me, so invoking its artificiality to talk about Atropia, another movie focused on simulation, would tickle me to no end.

Unfortunately, as I got deeper into Atropia, comparisons with The Truman Show no longer felt apt. In Atropia, everybody knows the world is fake—there’s no Jim Carrey unwittingly sincere in the face of artificiality. Medina Wazl is a training facility populated by actors and veterans. There’s no hiding from the unreal: announcements implore responsibility for blood bags while an artist paints fake limbs for the amputee actors to “lose” during "skirmishes". Most of the “insurgents” speak Spanish, not Arabic. Private iPod provides pop songs a cappella.

Set in 2006, there’s a war in Iraq underway, which motivates the war games, but those who take the exercises most seriously draw eye rolls. That intensity comes from different places: Fayruz (Alia Shawkat) sees these episodes as a springboard to Hollywood; she urges authenticity from her team to maximize her chance of being discovered. On the other hand, there’s Tanner (Callum Turner), who recently returned from a tour in Iraq but is itching for another round. He’s intent on coaching up those soon-to-be deployed boys who aren’t ready for the real war in the Middle East. With conflicting goals, Fayruz and Tanner grate on one another at first before a spark ignites between them. Pretending to be terrorists, they wreak havoc on would-be soldiers less committed to the bit, lording over their fake Fallujah between intimate whispers and saucy jokes.

But who are these two people really? Is their chemistry genuine, or is it another fake explosion from the simulation? Both want out of Medina Wazl and both center their lives on an Iraq ravaged by United States military efforts for…well, nobody’s able to articulate why exactly. That weighs on them, too, but that weight isn’t felt through the costumes and fake blood inspired by actual cultural garb and the very real violence and death happening a world away.

If this sounds like a heavy premise, I’ve misled you: this is a funny movie. More dark comedy than outright laugher, Atropia satirizes the American military’s involvement in Iraq with plenty of humor, much of which lands. Some elements don’t—a subplot involving a constipated reporter feels like a silly plot contrivance, and an early celebrity cameo dials things up a little too much—but most segments bring bite. In particular, every scene with Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny as dispassionate commanders overseeing the "operation" underlines the insincerity of the cause, and Chekov’s tortoise amused me every single time. Atropia is a cinematic throwback to my college years when Hollywood churned out anti-war films, but it has a defter touch than the satires did during the actual conflict. 

Moreover, Atropia ‘s scope exceeds the Iraq War. This is a film about self-deception, about performance and simulation and slipping into roles so deeply that we surrender some part of ourselves to them. Shawkat’s Fayruz embodies that dissociation from an acting perspective, but Turner’s Tanner feels the weight of his deployment; playing Abu Dice in a phony conflict feels more real than anything else. Forget The Truman Show: Atropia’s cinematic parallel is Synecdoche, New York, but with the intellectual self-seriousness limited to subtext scribbled on a port-o-potty wall.

The challenge of Atropia for writer-director Hailey Gates was juggling everything. To ask one film to be an anti-war critique, a commentary on simulation, and a convincing romance, all while maintaining the lightness of a comedy while edifice and construction intrude on every scene, is a tall order for a directorial debut feature. But she succeeds: Atropia is a joy to watch, rich with surprises until the very end and a brilliant vehicle for Shawkat to wield her full range of talents. Is it a tad over-ambitious? Probably. But it requires incredible touch to posit Charlie Kaufman-esque existential questions without forfeiting accessibility or warmth—and Gates does it. I can’t wait to watch what she does next.

Of course, Atropia has no release date yet; I’m not even sure it has a distributor lined up. But I still have a few hours with it available through the Sundance app. I might start it up again.

That’s the highest praise I can give the film.

Luz (2025)

There’s this dance exhibition during the second half of Luz that fascinated me.

I don’t usually get interpretive dance—I enjoy the rhythm, colors, and costumes divorced from any meaning—but this time, things clicked. The urban performance space uses reflective tape to simulate three-dimensional shapes. When the dancer moves and gyrates, our eyes perceive confinement, the lines evoking walls. But of course, these apparent edges are illusions of design, and the artist moves between them, demonstrating the error in our perceptions.

My leap of comprehension is brought to you by the bluntness of Luz, which played in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance this week. Despite so much going on within Flora Lau’s feature, the film underlines its message with the thickest Sharpie it can find. Touch grass, the film implores us. Touch grass.

Certainly, its principal characters would benefit. Wei (Xiaodong Guo) works as a small-time heavy for a billionaire club owner, but he obsesses over a young streamer (Enxi Deng) who happens to be his estranged daughter. After she rebuffs reconciliation, he retreats into Luz, a massive virtual reality game offering hundreds of synthetic worlds. Inside, he chances across Ren (Sandrine Penna), an unsatisfied woman in Hong Kong whose stepmother, Sabine (Isabella Hupert), is dying in France. Luz (the film) follows these characters in and out of Luz (the game), each searching for the elusive something that will make them whole.

As the dance scene suggests, Luz is a film about artificiality. Colorful neon lights bathe indoor settings in unnatural colors. Wei orbits a karaoke bar where patrons pretend to be great singers; Ren visits an art exhibition with Sabine where mounted neon poles illuminate her in radioactive green. There’s a fantastic scene where Wei enters a Luz lounge and walks between the pantomiming players in dark goggles. The place is silent, save for a stray hacking cough or haptic click. It’s eerie to see a glut of people crammed together but invisible to one another.

When Luz rides dancer/composer Mimi Xu’s amorphous score and the digital ambiance of simulated light forward, it excels and begs interesting questions. Wei grapples with the pursuit of his biological daughter, bristling when his would-be girlfriend’s grade schooler calls him “Daddy”; why chase a woman who loathes him when a little girl begs for his paternal affection? Ren is no different: she retreats into Luz in search of purpose, resisting the world at large and stalling her progress. Lau begs us to interrogate what is real and what isn’t, questioning an increasingly digital world and our collective penchant for withdrawing into it instead of, well, touching grass.

Unfortunately, Luz too often adopts the tone of a scolding octogenarian. Huppert’s Sabine gets most of these lines that sound tired and old-fashioned. “Why are you always looking at your phone?” she asks. “You left the show to play a game!” she chastises in another. Point taken—Ren does need to begin living without her goggles—but the lack of nuance rubs me the wrong way. Time and again, Luz exhorts us to go outside and find something real, to not become the art dealer who insists an authentic painting is fake when presented it outside fluorescent club lighting. We watch Sabine on the verge of death, still leaping into the ocean with intentional abandon, and you can hear Luz shouting, “See? See? This is the way!”

 

And…yeah. That’s probably true. We should all spend less time on our phones and playing video games to immerse ourselves in the vital hum of real life a few feet away. By putting her hand so forcefully on the scale, though, Lau compels me to seek balance. My life changed for the better because of connections I found online. Writing for an online audience challenges me intellectually and thrills me creatively. Of course, I need more than that, but Sabine would pluck my phone from my hands to pull me out of the house and into a rainstorm. And I’m allergic to grass.

Plus: the whole Luz game didn’t do much for me. Amusingly, I found the real worlds of the film—throbbing clubs, spiral freeways, underground galleries—far more alien than the synthetic forest or downtown Hong Kong “worlds” Ren and Wei enter. There’s a subplot involving a magical deer everybody’s hunting—Lau called it “the key to everything” in her foreword address—but I never found it compelling. In fact, that strand actively frustrated me: if Luz had been out long enough to become ubiquitous, somebody’s solving the deer! Novices crack Pokémon’s code within days of release. The Ready Player One model of “nObOdY’S fIgUrEd It OuT” is one step too far for me to buy into.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Luz. If it finds US distribution, I’ll see it in theaters in case it lands differently or the big screen conveys its digital visuals better than my TV.

But I suspect my enjoyment of Lau’s film has a firm ceiling. Too often, Luz became one of those glowing tape boxes Xu danced in front of, attempting to force my perspective toward touch grass territory. I knew it was fake, but it still felt claustrophobic, which is different than enlightening.