Bridget Jones’s Baby (12) Odeon, Cineworld ***

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 an 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 and her fellow 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 with Colin Firth and Hugh Grant’s paramours.

Thompson nabs several of the best lines as Bridget’s despairing obstetrician, including a one-liner that advises expectant fathers against witnessing the miracle of birth firsthand. Ignorance, like this rumbustious film, is bliss.

Blair Witch (15) Odeon, Cineworld **

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

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.

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