Les Visiteurs

A Jurassic Park-beating blockbuster in its native France, Les Visiteurs derives vast comic mileage from the simplest of high-concept premises.  After a wizard gets a spell muddled up, the 12th-century knight Count Godefroy (Jean Reno) and his Baldrick-like servant Jacquouille (Christian Clavier) are accidentally propelled into the future, ending up in 1992.  It’s a terrifyingly unfamiliar world, full of self-propelling devil’s chariots and bewildering appliances, populated by people who speak a language barely recognisable as good old medieval French.  But at least Godefroy’s old castle remains standing (even if it’s now a hotel), and when he runs into Béatrice (Valérie Lemercier), direct descendant of his lost love Frénégonde, there’s a chance that he might be able to pick up the threads of his life nearly nine centuries later and possibly even get back home.  Like Blackadder, it’s a mixture of the rude and crude and the surprisingly sophisticated.