Critics reviews

Pumping Iron is the best kind of documentary. It initiates its unsuspecting audience into a world they most likely knew nothing about... And, as this hypnotic, enthralling film shows, it’s also a gladiatorial arena where sometimes physical brawn is less important to winning than manipulative mind games and cut-throat conniving.

The movie is a very shrewd mixture of documentary and realistic fiction, put together with both eyes and ears on entertainment value... Its strongest card is the outrageously charismatic Schwarzenegger, but its view of musclemen and physique contests in general has a charm not unlike Rocky.

"Pumping Iron" is an amusing, buoyant documentary... [The film] is the sort of entertainment that can mean equally valid things to different segments of the audience. People who choose to respond to it as a comic view of athletic types will be justified, but so will people who consider it inspirational, a demonstration of what dedication and application in any calling may do for you.

[Pumping Iron] is a very good film, beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and — to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term —charming... [The filmmakers] do not patronize and they do not satirize. Rather, for 85 minutes they report objectively, yet sympathetically.

Interesting, rather slick and excessively long... The first thing the outsider realizes, watching [Pumping Iron], is that the object of all that weight-lifting is neither strength nor prowess, but appearance.

Pumping Iron contains some visually poetic segments and is an informative meditation on the sport as an old mixture of pain and narcissistic pleasure. Schwarzeneggar who was seen in Bob Rafelson's film Stay Hungry recently retired from body-building. He is sure to have a career in the movies.