THE VAULT ***

 I love a really good heist movie because a really good heist movie has to be super-smart as well as exciting if it's to hold our attention and entertain us and the best heist movies are classics of their kind. "The Vault" may not be quite 'classic' material but it's still hugely entertaining, superbly plotted and very exciting. If, on close inspection, the plot has more holes in it than a large Swiss cheese, who cares; this is a guilty pleasure of the most pleasurable kind and one of the best heist movies in a very long time and like a lot of heist movies, especially since the name-checked Danny Ocean hit a few casinos in Vegas, this one has you routing for the thieves.

The boss of the operation is Irish actor Liam Cunningham while gang members include Sam Riley, Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Luis Tosar and Alex Stein but the self-appointed mastermind is Freddie Highmore, a twenty-two year old engineering genius whose brain is needed to crack the vault. The setting is Madrid during the World Cup and the job is to retrieve some rare Spanish coins seized by the Spanish government from Cunningham during a salvage operation.

Of course, if you can actually follow what's happening step-by-step you're a smarter cookie than I am but then you don't go to a heist movie to see a step-by-step guide on how to rob a bank; you go for the sheer fun to be had watching others do it and Jaume Balaguero's "The Vault" is a fun movie of the first rank. The only surprise is why it went straight to Amazon, at least here in the UK, as it has box-office success written all over it.

ALIAS NICK BEAL *

 Another variation on 'Faust', this time from John Farrow with a miscast Thomas Mitchell as the Faust character, a decent District Attorney who, somewhat inadvertently, sells his soul to become Governor and Ray Milland as his Mephistopheles, "Alias Nick Beal". It's certainly not in the same class as William Dieterle's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Milland is unusually stiff as the devilish Beal but its combination of old-fashioned fantasy and film noir still works and even without the direct reference to Old Nick this tale of a good man who sells out is a familiar one. This may not be the best version but the Faust legend has always proved popular and this was no exception, (it's quite highly thought of in some quarters). It's certainly stylish and it looks just fine but the pace is funerally slow and it's left to Audrey Totter as the temptress with a conscience to give the picture what lift she can

I WAS AT HOME, BUT... ***

 The title might make you think of Ozu's masterly tale of childhood "I Was Born, But...", however German director Angela Schanelec's "I Was At Home, But..." is an altogether more challenging affair, typical of the woman who made "The Dreamed Path". It's also a film about childhood, or at least a film with a child as one of its principal protagonists, but this rigorous and admittedly difficult film totally belies any cosiness or sense of closure, turning its attention instead, not so much on the child, but on a distraught mother who appears to be having some sort of breakdown.

Something, perhaps terrible, has happened to the child in question but Schanelec doesn't feel the need to explain it or even to explain the subsequent actions of anyone involved. We seem to have been dropped into the middle of something we don't understand and are left to work things out for ourselves. This is what life is like, she is telling us, not what we usually see when we go to the movies. With only a few films to her credit she is an already established auteur as well as one of cinema's great female directors and her work demands to be seen; just don't expect the obvious or even to be entertained but if you are prepared to enter into her world you will be amply rewarded.