According to the Kinsey report, the average man was doing it way above average and in many more positions than anyone had previously thought possible. “Sexual morality needs to be reformed, and science will show the way,” he said. It was the late forties in a world poised for revolution – communist, cultural and in this case, sexual. Kinsey is the life story of the celebrated sex-researcher as filtered through the lens of Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters). It’s a remarkable story of freedom and paranoia, ignorance and prejudice served on a warm bed of love and understanding. It’s probable that no other American filmmaker could successfully marry the required sensitivity and audacity with such satisfying results. While a former bug researcher startles the world with the results of his new study, he, Kinsey (Liam Neeson), remains as timidly excited as an adolescent on his first date. His wife, Laura Linney, is having an endorsed, open relationship with his bisexual assistant, Peter Sarsgaard. These are modern times that arrive early and as the Kinsey’s are plunged into the paranoid Fifties, the times exact their toll. Kinsey is awash with the visual trappings and directorial flourishes of a truly great movie. In Linney, Condon has the consummate all-American good bad-girl, a perfect match for Neeson’s pioneering, results-driven radical whose work irrevocably changed modern Western culture, whether our moral guardians like it or not. And for that, we should all be grateful. As Rolling Stone succinctly deliberates: “Kinsey wanted to snap the public out of sexual ignorance. And Condon's knockout of a movie tries to do the same”.// COLIN FRASER