Rating: R
Genre:
Drama
Theatrical Release: 11/12/2004(USA
Release Date: 05/17/2005
SubTitles: English/Espanol
Dubbed: English/French/Espanol
Sound: DD5.1/DDS/DTS
Run Time: 118 Minutes
Flags: Nudity, Adult Situations, Strong Sexual Content, Not For Children, Adult Humor, Profanity
Distributor/Studio: 20th Century Fox
Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist who taught at Indiana University and had a keen interest in an area of human behavior that had seen little scholarly research -- human sexuality. While the courtship and reproductive patterns of animals had been carefully documented,
Kinsey believed that most "established facts" about human sexual behavior were a matter of conjecture rather than research and that what most people said about their sex lives was not born out by the evidence (a subject that had personal resonance for him given the troubles he and his wife
Clara Kinsey had in the early days of their marriage). After introducing a course in "Marriage" at Indiana University which offered frank and factual information on sex to students,
Kinsey began an exhaustive series of interviews with a wide variety of people from all walks of life in order to find out the truth about sex practices in America. When he published
Sexual Behavior and the Human Male in 1948, his findings were wildly controversial, indicating that most men had a wider variety of sexual experiences than most people imagined, including a number of practices commonly thought to be dangerous or perverted (including pre-marital sex, same-sex contacts, and masturbation). An even greater outcry greeted
Kinsey's next volume,
Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, which contradicted common notions than most women went into marriage sexually inexperienced.
Kinsey is a film
biography written and directed by
Bill Condon which examines
Kinsey's life and work from his strict childhood until his death in 1956.
Liam Neeson plays
Alfred Kinsey, and
Laura Linney co-stars as
Kinsey's wife and colleague
Clara.
John Lithgow highlights the supporting cast as
Kinsey's repressed and moralistic father, while
Chris O'Donnell,
Peter Sarsgaard, and
Timothy Hutton play members of
Kinsey's research team and
Tim Curry appears as an IU faculty member at odds with
Kinsey's teachings.
~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide