Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, for some reason, on Sunday.

Recently, the producers of Hollywood blockbusters have decided to use the prestigious, artsy fartsy international awards show to showcase their… let’s say, more mainstream projects. A few years ago The Da Vinci Code got totally owned by critics at the press screening, but they’ve kept it up, all the same.

So it’s heartening to see that the festival’s snobby audience had a fairly positive, if calculated, reaction. Here’s a snippet from French reviewer Alain Spira, from the magazine Paris Match:

“It’s good. It’s a product that is polished, industrial, we’re not getting ripped off in terms of quality.

You know what you’re going to see, you see what you get, and when you leave you’re happy.”

When you leave, you’re happy?!? That’s the very best kind of review a movie can get! Okay, maybe in France it’s kind of a drawback. But everywhere else, that’s exactly what I want to hear. Because let me tell you, leaving happy is the opposite of what happened to me in the past year as I saw most other other big budget stinkers, including Transformers and Iron Man.

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