Do you Bean? If you do Bean, rejoice. Bean is back. If you don't Bean, here's a chance to start. Bean now, or forever hold your peace.

With his elephantine, prehensile ears, his giant nose, his tiny body, his long legs and arms and his oversize hands, Mr. Bean would terrify most children at first glance, but then they'd detect the weird benevolence in his vibration and his odd take on things that pretty much matches theirs. He has the purest one-task mind on the planet, is fearless because he really isn't that interested in the universe and, though strange, is blessed with nature's grace and gentility.

And they'd be happy, as they will be when they catch the delightful "Mr. Bean's Holiday," in which, it could be said, he jumps through the Hulot-hoop. That is to say, drawing on Jacques Tati's famous 1954 "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," Rowan Atkinson, Bean's Oxford-educated creator, has fashioned a deeply amusing tale about the child-man on the way to Cannes. There, among other subplots, the seldom-speaking Mr. Bean must restore a missing boy (Max Baldry) to his parents, promote a young beauty (Emma de Caunes) to the stardom she deserves and defrock a pompous American fraud (good sport Willem Dafoe), while at the same time solving a batch of problems in that special Bean way. And watching him take down that monstrous French artifice known as the Cannes Film Festival happens to be one of the prime pleasures of the summer.

-- Stephen Hunter (August 24, 2007)

Contains nothing offensive.