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“Bigger, Stronger, Faster” A very entertaining documentary about what steroids mean to America, seen through the fretful eyes of director Chris Bell and his brothers, bodybuilders all. The film hops over the wall of media outrage and wonders why Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire are accused of cheating when our entire culture rewards winning at all costs. As surreally entertaining as a Michael Moore film and less pushy too. (107 min., R) (Ty Burr)
“The Foot Fist Way” A low-budget comedy about a loser tae kwon do instructor (the remarkable Danny McBride, who co-wrote the script) that sustains a mood of bracing strip-mall satire for about 30 minutes before it begins repeating itself. The filmmakers can’t decide whether they’re making a frat-boy comedy or a work of acerbic indie realism. Some good, vulgar horselaughs, though. (87 min., R) (Ty Burr)
“Kung Fu Panda” The star of the new computer-generated family film isn’t Jack Black but the design-and-render gurus at DreamWorks Animation. Black provides the voice of a goofball panda in medieval China, desperate to prove himself to a Yoda-like master (Dustin Hoffman). A lushly beautiful, even soulful, visual experience has been yoked to a story line that wouldn’t fool a three-year-old. Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, and Seth Rogen provide additional voices. (91 min., PG) (Ty Burr)
“The Mother of Tears” The new bloodbath from the Italian horror maestro Dario Argento traverses the same trashy terrain as the average horror movie. But Argento sets the genre’s standard then surpasses it. This tale, about an archeologist besieged by demons that want to destroy Rome, is not Dario at his best. But his enthusiasm for shlock is contagious and gonzo. For this occasion he becomes the horror director who’d rather crack us (and himself) up than freak anybody out. (97 min., unrated) (Wesley Morris)

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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. The film kicks off with a montage of the cheesetastic stars of the 1980s. There’s a pile-driving Hulk Hogan, a bare-torsoed Sly Stallone strafing his enemies in Rambo, and Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his veiny, condom-filled-with-coconuts biceps. These ripped and snarling muscleheads incarnated the new, pumped-up American might of the Reagan era, with Gold’s Gym in L.A. as their training mecca, and Christopher Bell, the director of Bigger, Stronger, Faster, lets us know how much they meant to him as a kid. Of course, two of them (Stallone is the exception) have since admitted to using anabolic steroids — i.e., synthetic testosterone. By the time Bell shows us Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa smashing home runs, I’m thinking: Okay, we get it! Steroids are a lie! They turned the USA into a land of fraudulent jock kings!
The truth, according to the movie, is more complicated — and fascinating. Hooked on their image of hard-muscled potency, Bell and his two brothers, all of whom tended toward the tubby, became bodybuilders. Both the brothers embraced steroids, and the film presents them, with touching candor, as broken and desperate men, eager to escape suburban banality through their addiction to the vanity of power and size. Yet just when Bigger, Stronger, Faster looks like it will turn into an exposé of the evils of steroid use, the film takes a surprise turn. It admits that using steroids is ”cheating,” but it also says that steroids have been demonized — turned into a scapegoat for a society that craves…more.
The movie traces their use in athletics back to the 1950s, when they were given (in secret) to American Olympic teams to compete with the Soviets, who were already using them. Bell piles up compelling evidence that the drugs’ hazards and side effects, from ‘roid rage to liver damage, have been overstated by the media in Reefer Madness fashion. (We see hilarious clips from a cautionary 1994 Ben Affleck TV episode.) He poses the questions: Why is steroid use frowned upon — but sleeping in a high-altitude chamber to raise a bike racer’s blood-oxygen level okay? Why is Tiger Woods’ LASIK surgery, which gave him close to perfect vision, an acceptable performance enhancement? As a filmmaker, Bell has guts. He faces down the disgraced Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson, and he takes on the $24 billion body-supplement industry, a snake-oil empire in which ”Before” and ”After” photos are shot the same day. Not to mention the use of cortisone shots in locker rooms; the classical musicians who ease their performance anxiety with beta-blockers; and a dozen other examples. ”There’s a clash in America,” says Bell, ”between doing the right thing and being the best.” Bigger, Stronger, Faster is a portrait of a culture that claims to hate steroids but may, by now, be too pumped to do much about it. A-

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