Bigger, Stronger, Faster* Reviews
Top Critic
A thoughtful, informative and thoroughly entertaining examination of the role of performance-enhancing drugs in modern life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
A lively and incisive look into the nation's growing preoccupation with pumped-up superlatives.
Smart, touching and enlightening, a combination that makes Bigger, Stronger, Faster the best documentary of the year so far.
Full Review
| Original Score: a-
By making this journey personal, a powerful vulnerability permeates the film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It'll shake up your beliefs not just about steroids but about competition, hypocrisy, body obsession and American notions of masculinity.
Bell posits that their disillusionment is a side effect of being American and he may well be right.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is that rare film that truly challenges its audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A hugely entertaining personal documentary about what steroids mean to American pop culture.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This movie is remarkable in that it seems to be interested only in facts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The film isn't quite a memoir; it's also a platform to branch off into other areas, briskly and informatively and with a good deal of clearheadedness.
There's been a glut of pointless first- person documentaries lately, but newcomer Christopher Bell has a legitimate personal take in his film about Americans who use anabolic steroids.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a fascinating and unexpectedly profound and melancholy meditation on what we have become as a country and on the misguided obsessions that made us this way.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
The performance-enhancing quality behind this muscular movie is director Chris Bell's willingness to go far beyond the call of duty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Bell finds the epitome of that tragedy in his own family and, in his first film, digs unflinchingly at its roots.
...manages to be two films at once: One is an informative portrait of a power-hungry society; the other is an intensely gripping narrative of personal growth.
A good documentary will take you places you didn't plan to go, but I didn't really expect that from Bigger, Stronger, Faster, an incisive and compulsively watchable look at America's love affair with steroids.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
More scrupulously reported than your average Michael Moore film but every bit as entertaining.
