Being crazier than the world outside is an awfully high bar to clear right now. But the Netflix documentary Tiger King soars over with room to spare. A self-described “gun-carrying redneck with a mullet” who amasses one of the country’s largest collections of wild cats, Joe Exotic (né Shreibvogel) would be a full meal for a more sedate series, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin serve up a seven-course, five-hour banquet of off-the-wall characters, enough to justify their subtitle: “Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.” Tiger King is also a sprawling, ethically shaky mess, starting off as an abstracted, Errol Morris-style character study, shifting to a first-person filmmaker-on-a-quest framing, then settling into the familiar shape of a tabloid-TV magazine show and that’s just within the first 10 minutes. The opening teaser spoils what ought to be the story’s big reveal that Joe, the garrulous, animal-loving proprietor of a private zoo, ends up in jail as part of a murder-for-hire plot, in the name of hooking viewers early, and the series keeps cutting back to phone interviews with him as it meanders its way towards its sordid conclusion. Tiger King is genuinely compulsive viewing, although those who are sensitive to depictions of animal abuse should be warned that while we don’t see that much of it, it’s sometimes described in graphic detail. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash, but only if that car crashed into a jet plane and then both tumbled into an oil tanker.

– Compilation