by MATTHEW HAYS

There are those movies that gain momentum at the box office due to their uncanny prescience. Perhaps most notable was The China Syndrome, a film about a meltdown at a nuclear reactor that came out within weeks of the Three Mile Island disaster, the worst nuclear accident in American history.

Kinsey doesn't quite approach that level of prescience, but the timing of its release does seem odd. Just as a renewed social conservatism and family-values backlash is being credited for Bush's second-term victory, we have the release of a more-than-competent biopic of Alfred Kinsey. And though it probably will appeal to those who voted for Bush about as much as a Michael Moore movie would, it is a fascinating story, beautifully shot and acted.

Liam Neeson, in what is bound to be an Oscar-nominated performance, plays the famous sex researcher. In fairly straightforward biopic style, Kinsey recounts its namesake's rise to fame, beginning as a mild-mannered scientist with a fascination with wasps, who recognized that the area of human sexuality remained a largely unexplored phenomenon. In his naivety, Kinsey felt that if he and his researchers looked into people's sex lives with a scientific matter-of-factness, they would bring various issues out of the dark and demystify them. This in turn would alleviate the guilt, pain and shame so often associated with the act (or acts, as Kinsey would learn).

Kinsey was both right and wrong. His studies, the first of which was published in 1948, revealed that masturbation was practically universally practised by men, that bisexuality was far more common than previously imagined and that about 10 per cent of the male population were exclusively homosexual. (Kinsey later revised this last statistic.) Sadly, religious and social conservatives didn't like what Kinsey was revealing, and the man suffered terribly and risked becoming a complete social and academic outcast.

Ironically, the current climate of repression only enhances the act of watching Kinsey. This fine film reminds us of the dangers of allowing conservative social pressure to shut up those who have a dissenting opinion. It is also one of the best films of the year.

Kinsey opens Friday, Nov. 26

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