IT'S been 10 years since Bean, Rowan Atkinson's first big screen outing as the bumbling fool in the kipper tie. This fish out of water comedy in which Bean goes to France only shows how much better suited it is to television: up this close, even one look up those enormous nostrils is nauseating. The rest of the time he gets up your nose with his poor man's Chaplin routine.

The situational gags are built around Bean's attempt at getting to Cannes after winning a holiday at a raffle. He loses his passport, money, transport, accidentally kidnaps a young boy and gets his tie stuck in a dispensing machine.

Willem Dafoe is a film director whose day is ruined; Emma De Caunes is a French actress who gives him a lift in a lemon mini identical to his own. A cleverpants homage to French comic genius Jacques Tati at the end only shows up its limitations.

Days Of Glory (Richard Bouchareb)
Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Sami Bouajila, Bernard Blancan Running time: 123 minutes . . .

A STIRRING world war two drama about the exploits of green North African soldiers fighting for France against the Nazi war machine. But director Richard Bouchareb channels the film's aggression towards the French authorities, which treated these brave fighters as second-class citizens. Here, they are the first to be fed into the jaws of death.

It has the indignation of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and the group dynamics of Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers. Bouchareb turns to Spielberg too for a coda which anchors its message to the present. He succeeded: it prompted French president Jacques Chirac to reverse a 47year-old law which had frozen the expatriate fighters' pensions.