Critic Reviews

• Ed Gonzalez, Los Angeles Times

  This is lyricism at its most extreme, at once gripping and off-putting because Archer views his characters as if he were gawking at them through the bars of a cage.

• Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

  [Director] Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.

• John Hartl, Seattle Times

  Wild Tigers I Have Known studiously avoids the clichés of the genre. It's also exasperatingly inconclusive. Its dreamy, enigmatic characters often fail to engage.

• Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

  The filmmaker, Cam Archer, seems to be trying for a mood of hazy self-pity, which he achieves just enough to make you wish he'd get over it.

• Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

  While there's something admirable in [director] Archer's attempt at making an ambient song of the self out of the protagonist's search for sexual identity (along with some heavily metaphorical mountain-lion attacks), the result is empty.

• John Anderson, Newsday

  Young writer-director Cam Archer uses disjointed imagery, textures and clashing sound to create something seamlessly odd and poignantly pubescent.

• Karina Longworth, Cinematical

  The movie wears its ancestors on its sleeve -- Tarnation and My Own Private Idaho, sure, but also Kenneth Anger, Warhol, Harmony Korine.

• MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher

  A vague, disjointed daydream passing for a film...

• Don Willmott, Filmcritic.com

  Beautifully, I mean really beautifully, shot

• Eric D. Snider, EricDSnider.com

  If you allow yourself to be immersed in its often beautiful images and its reflective, ethereal atmosphere, it can be a memorable experience.

• Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

  Totally twee (which is to say, completely annoying), but Cam Archer seems to understand his talent as he does his main character: a work-in-progress.

• Brian Orndorf, eFilmCritic.com

  Archer hypothesizes that the junior high boner is the first step toward a lifetime of heartache and peer humiliation, and his argument is a vivid one.

• Frank Ochieng, Movie Eye

  There's just not enough psychological mustard to cover this earnest hotdog-of-a-movie about a male loner's breakout infatuation with the studmuffin of his wildest dreams.

• Pam Grady, Reel.com

  There is talent on display here, but it is ill-used, and that makes Wild Tigers I Have Known a frustrating experience.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

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

Read all 15 critic reviews