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It's a movie with a single letter, no number (G) rating. It's a movie with virtually no dialogue. It's a movie where no one can remember the star's name – even though he's in nearly every shot of the film. But more important, it's a movie that's hilarious from start to finish. Boomers: Don't be turned off by the G rating – the humor in this film is worthy of all age groups.

British actor Rowan Atkinson invented his character for a television series that ran from 1990-1995, followed by the successful movie Bean in 1997. After a detour from the character in the 2003 movie Johnny English (a critics-devastated box office hit), it took Atkinson 10 years to bring Bean back to the big screen. Presumably he's used these years for some creative gestation, because this is the best Bean yet.

Unlike some comic characters, Atkinson's Bean isn't one that is loved by everyone. In fact, his all-too-British looks and mannerisms can be far from endearing to a lot of people. Essentially a silent movie character, in those few instances when Bean does talk, he sounds more like a deep-throated German with a bad case of laryngitis. But except for the dramatic vocal contrast, Bean is a thoroughly Anglicized Pee Wee Herman, complete with similar body language and facial tics.

Mr. Bean's Holiday takes the classic form of the road movie, with Bean's winning raffle ticket allowing him to escape cold, dreary England for a visit to Cannes and the sunny French Riviera. And of course, it's timed to coincide with the Cannes Film Festival, the glamour capital of the world. Along the way he teams up with a young boy separated from his Russian movie director father because of Bean's train station antics, while the police mistakenly believe that he has abducted the boy. And since every movie has to have an attractive young female, Bean and his young friend are picked up by an aspiring actress motoring to Cannes for the premiere of her movie debut – a one-minute-of-fame role that explains why she isn't getting the red carpet treatment.

Atkinson is obviously a student of film comedy history. His Bean character owes as much a debt to Charlie Chaplin as it does to Pee Wee Herman. One of the movie's most inspired and hilarious moments is straight out of Chaplin's book of comic tricks. While dining at a high class Parisian restaurant (presided over by another comic genius, the French actor Jean Rochefort playing the Maitre D'), Bean is confronted with a plate of oysters and crayfish. Not knowing what to do with this unappetizing spread, he surreptitiously slides the oysters into the purse of a neighboring diner, a loose parody of the famous restaurant scene in Chaplin's The Immigrant. But unable to dispose of the crayfish under the Maitre D's watchful eye, Bean proceeds to devour them whole, shells and all, in another parody of Chaplin devouring his old shoe in The Gold Rush.

The movie builds to a dramatic crescendo and an ending that pulls everything together on the beaches of Cannes and in the Film Festival's Palace of Cinema. Not only does Bean's road trip come to an end, so does a sub-plot, the journey to Cannes of an arrogant, pretentious filmmaker played by Willem Dafoe. Dafoe has a film premiere at the Festival, the same film in which Bean's actress travel companion has a bit role. And here's where Atkinson's comic touch moves into savage satire. Dafoe's film, playing on the screen while Bean engages in slapstick projection booth antics, will be recognized by the Cannes Festival world as a brutal satire of Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny, said to be the worst and most pretentious movie ever shown at Cannes. Since Brown Bunny played at the 2003 Cannes Festival, the same year that Atkinson's Johnny English didn't, there probably isn't a coincidence at work.

Why Did We Pick This Movie? Because it's a work of inspired comic genius. Even if the very British Bean isn't exactly your cup of tea, you'll be laughing with the rest of the crowd from beginning to end.

Want more? See which other movies we recommend.