Tiger King

Joe Exotic runs a ramshackle roadside zoo in rural Oklahoma, breeding tigers and lions with cowboy bravado, a blond mullet, and a stable of much younger husbands. He performs country songs about his own life, carries guns everywhere, and nurses a furious, escalating feud with animal-rights activist Carole Baskin, whom he blames for trying to shut him down.

He is a documentary subject who behaves like a scripted character, and the filmmakers barely have to shape him — his contradictions do the work. Genuine tenderness toward his cats sits beside menace and self-mythologizing showmanship, and the camera catches him performing for it constantly, which makes him riveting and unnerving in equal measure.