KINSEY

Written and directed by Bill Condon

Liam Neeson
Laura Linney
Peter Sarsgaard
Chris O'Donnell

Premiere date: November 12, 2004
R for pervasive sexual content, including some graphic images and descriptions.

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. 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.

National Board of Review
Best Supporting Actress - Laura Linney
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1 Academy Award Nomination
Best Supporting Actress - Laura Linney

Ebert on An Education

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Roger Ebert arrived today in Toronto for the upcoming festival and has seen An Education. Apparently he liked it, as he had some strong words of praise for the film, Peter Sarsgaard and newcomer Carey Mulligan.

"Some of the TIFF films, many of them strong, were screened early for Chicago critics. The one that stood out for me above all the others was Lone Scherfig's "An Education," starring Carey Mulligan as a 16-year-old who starts dating a man well into his 30s (Peter Sarsgaard). In 1960s London, he's everything the witless boys her age are not - and also not everything he seems to be.

There's something about Sarsgaard's cool detachment that makes him ideal for roles involving plausible deception; we can even believe it when he convinces her protective parents to trust him. What a smoothie. What's special about the film is the way it takes a common enough movie situation and reinvents it from scratch, especially with the intelligent, far from clueless, teenage girl.

It has long been said that opening night at Toronto represents opening day of the Academy Award season. Waiting for the curtain to raise, who looks like a sure thing for a nomination? Carey Mulligan from "An Education," I'd say. The scenes in Paris will remind you of Audrey Hepburn."