Metacritic reviews

Chock full of larger-than-life characters, it's an enthralling insight into a raw, bloodied world.

Knuckle is the real deal, with the strapping, brutally human Traveller clans butting heads with not only one another but with the very future of their subculture's existence.

Palmer keeps his focus tightly on the families, which makes the movie admirably unpretentious but also incomplete. Nevertheless, the picture has a vibrant central character in James McDonagh, the leading fighter in the clan who begins to question the rites of violence.

As anthropology lessons go, Knuckle is strong stuff, and it's easy to accept Palmer's conclusion that the problem he's showing us may well have no solution.

Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.

The film is very much like a home movie in trying to tell its story of families and feuds complete with the bad lighting, bad camera angles and meandering observations. Though you will wish for more polish and insight, its unruly action is hard to resist.

It's an involving but frustrating peek into a private culture involved in a self-defeating cycle of violence and mythologizing.

While the film becomes slightly redundant, the anger and strife its characters cannot overcome is awful, poetic and, frankly, astonishing.

A documentary of bareknuckle fights among feuding Irish Traveller clans can't give the participants' self-perpetuating, dead-end rivalry the scope of tragedy.

Palmer's acknowledgement of his own involvement in, and thrill at watching, these events speaks volumes, but simply showing generations of pasty, fat men pounding each other to a pulp shouldn't be mistaken for an in-depth exploration of Gaelic machismo.