Metacritic reviews

fFrst-time feature filmmaker Cam Archer turns what might have been an exercise in salaciousness into a stylish visual poem about desire and adolescent alienation.

Not simply a coming-out story but a journey into the conflicted androgyny of early adolescence.

Like "Twelve and Holding," another film from last year's New Directors series, Wild Tigers achingly sympathizes with the desperate lengths an obsessed adolescent will go to in pursuit of love. As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of "Tea and Sympathy," the future teachers of Logan's life lessons will "be kind."

The low-low budget ($50,000) coming-of-age drama, shot on high-def video, is nothing if not daring and innovative.

While the film feels a little creepy towards the end, Archer has a really amazing visual style and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

Tigers shares a penchant for rigorous self-analysis with such relatively recent films as "Chumscrubber," "Mysterious Skin" and "Tarnation."

Striking and self-indulgent in equal measure, Cam Archer's first feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known, is an impressive declaration of talent that nonetheless gets a little drunk and disorderly at the trough of High Art. Arresting visual and sonic textures frequently overwhelm sketchy narrative, leaving surface provocation too seldom ballasted by deeper psychological truths or emotional impact.

The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.

The film is distancing and off-putting, more a feat of look-at-me-ma derring-do than something resonant, meaningful and just the slightest bit moving.

Fragmentation can be an artful method; it can also be the last refuge for someone who scarcely knows how to make a film. In the no-budget fantasia Wild Tigers I Have Known, the fragments are like a borrowed collage of gay coming-of-age tropes.