I don't think this belongs to the league of cinema masterpieces, nevertheless I think it is still a decent movie, with its own dignity, worth seeing. I think that dismissing quickly a movie just because it's not based on a totally new concept is a bit unfair; if we were to allow only this kind of movies to be produced, we would go to the cinema once every year or two; movies, like books and other forms of storytelling, build on each other, they can look at the same theme from different angles and perspectives, still maintaining all their raison d'être. The most immediate, obvious link of the Les Heritiers is The Dead Poets Society, which was proposing a similar situational context (a teacher trying to motivate a group of disengaged students) but a very different socio-cultural one. I happened to watch Les Heritiers a few days after I saw American Honey, which on the contrary offers a different situational context, against a pretty similar socio-cultural background; I thought they all contribute to an interesting debate, one point of view about a lost, hopeless generation and the other one just opposite to that, offering a "yes, we can" message. Specifically, I think Les Heritiers has the merit of prosing a rather honest look on a rather sensitive subject like the coexistence of different cultures and religions in the French marginal society. The movie is able to do that avoiding any moral judgement or patronising position, using a realistic style and leveraging good acting by most of protagonists.
Review of Once in a Lifetime
