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'Travellers" are a culturally distinct, nomadic peoples, who camp along the fringes of urban Irish (and to a lesser extent English and American) society. Recent genetic research tells us that the split between Travellers (or Pavees)and the "settled" folk of Éire began a millennium ago. Clanish and self-isolated, they are "among the most discriminated- against ethnic groups in Ireland".

"King of the Travellers" begins brilliantly with a lead-in of old black and white documentary footage of humble Traveller families, spliced with some great rough Irish céilí music and documentary-style footage of the film's cast in character. This sets the tone for a movie that, although it's fiction, realistically sums up the hard life of a people trying to hang on to its cultural heritage in the face of the growing hegemonies of modern Ireland. Conflicts within families and between families, between cliques and clans, between neighbors and officialdom highlight both the earthy bent of, and the ever-increasing restrictions on, the Traveller life style.

Writer-director Mark O'Connor toys with Shakespearean themes as well; and somewhat unevenly. It's hard sometimes to guess his intentions, to know for certain what kind of movie we're watching. We get hints of Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer's Night Dream, along with quotes and references to other films too; "The Godfather" has been mentioned by critics, and to my eye, there are certainly nods to Kusturica's "Time of the Gypsies." But the Irish landscape and its people and horses- and its music- are easily able to carry the aesthetic weight of the film. Many of the players are Travellers themselves and they perform admirably well: we seldom think of them as amateur actors but are able to accept them as authentic characters. It isn't hard to intuit the real cultural gap between them and the "settled" population, nor, at the same time, to see the common humanity both sides share.

Prejudice gets stirred up by transgression, real and perceived; it grows in a climate of ignorance and matures when greed and political necessity replace honest judgement; the examination of this process, as it buffets the innocent, constitutes the real theme of "King of the Travellers".

But besides leading us on a virtual tour of the realities of an embattled group of people, the director wants us to feel the gypsy pull of freedom; he would like us to sense the joyous possibility of an ethical reality outside the stricture of law. Maybe that's a prototypical kind of fantasy, but O'Connor, who doesn't romanticize his Travellers much, makes us wonder.

So what if this film is occasionally heavy handed? It presents an unfamiliar reality with good will and sympathy; and there are moments of real beauty in it. If you want my advice, don't suspend your disbelief- instead, simply accept that you're being told a story by an honest bard, a story well worth hearing.

i gived it 10 but really this movie is eleven. you just can't give eleven on this site. i tried. it has sex love &violence. but not much drugs or rock and roll. then it would be twelve. you can't give 12 either. i didn't try but i don't think so. Seriously though: this is a serious comedy about the stupid inheriting the earth; and it doesn't play for cheap laughs, although there are many fine shades and degrees of slapstick here. It's well acted and directed and the ambiance is nicely envisioned, it's a future world that is believable. And it's just a really funny good humored piece of escapist fiction- a kind of 1984 or Brave New World: for the literarally impaired or just for all of us who need to be reminded of how serious and how laughable the world situation is. You can't help caring for these future idiots and, by extension, for their relatives (progenitors is the big word) in the present. While Idiocracy lays out its rough sketch of a road map for intellectual responsibility in an easy-to-swallow way, it also foreshadows and forewarns of the possible futility of all purely good-hearted efforts, and it does so in a real funny and good-hearted way. I'd vote this film into the Smithsonian.

The inflexibility of 40's existentialism, seen through the eyes of 50's nuclear panic, placed in the period of late 70's hedonism; laced with 80's scary movie precepts and au courant moral conundrums. One needs to remember (or understand): the button, through the 50's &60's was the symbol for starting a nuclear war, a la Dr. Strangelove; and the box meant television (as in the "idiot box"). The movie is a flawed undertaking, but immense, on the order of The Matrix, for instance, and well worth engaging with.

There our some problems with apparently out of sequence scene shooting schedules; the actors aren't always really certain where they're supposed to be coming from. The sound track is at times profoundly absent, which may or may not enhance the mood of the film. The movie is often darkly suspenseful and often beautifully put together (though scenes sometimes seems to be a collage of effects, moods, and quotes from other pictures). Best for the viewer to accept The Box on its own terms- the references to film styles and time periods and architectural spaces are meaningful and intended to help us structure questions about the nature of good and evil; these questions needn't be the obvious ones.