Recently saw two movies that exceeded my expectations -

Willem Dafoe in Inside - this movie is about a high-end art thief stuck inside a luxury apartment with a complex security system that completely shuts down the exit and entry to the apartment when activated.  Dafoe mainly carries this entire film that comes along with sparse dialog and with filming that seems to have been influenced by David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddity.  This film is like watching a season of the History Channel's Alone series where people compete to survive in inhospitable environments. 

Some may like it and some may complain it is too slow, but Dafoe's performance had me riveted. 

The next one is Babylon.  I stayed away from this film due to the hype and because I thought it was mostly a musical.  What a huge surprise this film ended up being.  I highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys pieces that take a look at the history of Hollywood. 

There are several scenes that are so funny and had me laughing out loud (one is a Cohen Brother's-like scene of a filmed sequence that keeps getting interrupted in different ways and has to be re-filmed over and over again). It also has some very powerful scenes that really resonate). 

In one way, it seems to have a dual-personality in how it wants to be perceived overall - what I mean is, does it want to have the texture of a Cohen Brother's film, or a somewhat serious piece that revisits the start of the Hollywood environment of unmoored decadence and debauchery.

It does have some graphic sexual depictions, but man, I had a good time watching this flick.