Bill Condon's breakthrough film, Gods and Monsters, was a brilliant interweaving of the life and art of Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale, within a setting that reflected upon both fact and myth, and provided a context for exploring the themes set in play without lapsing into sermonizing. Kinsey is a biopic: a much more by-the-numbers telling of a much more complicated history, and the film unfortunately reverts to stereotype and sermons to become, quite frankly, the Gee Whiz Sex Ed film it likes to mock. This is a great story and there is much to like about this movie. Alfred Kinsey was famous (and infamous!) for pioneering a clinical approach to human sexuality and practices. His research — which found a gap between what people thought/said about sex and what they actually did — made for bestsellers in the 1950s and helped launched the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. Kinsey makes clever use of the doctor's "Personal Sex History" questionaire as a narrative device, skipping through backstory via answers provided to pointed, personal questions. The performances, especially Liam Neeson in the lead, are uniformly solid and the rest of the ensemble cast (aided by great makeup) help the story flow naturally over the decades.

Yet, like those Teen Sex Hygiene class films, one can't help feel that there are depths to be plumbed with this subject that an ideologically-tinged treatment tends to package too neatly. The conflict between Kinsey's reductionism (sex is just "mammalian behavior") and the real world consequences and implications of such a starting point are touched on in obligatory manner, but aren't confronted with the honesty all Kinsey's frank talk about sex would seem to demand. True, they bring in a genuine pervert to brag of conquests that include children as a chance to Draw the Line: "Guess someone like me puts your beliefs [in impartiality] to the test." But nowhere is that "Line" reconciled to Kinsey's earlier contention that "Diversity is life's irreducible factor, only variation is real." Indeed. Man may be an animal, but he is the Storytelling Animal, and the use of science to legitimize behavior seems little different than the use of religion, which is demonized here with the same sort of scare tactics once used against masturbation.

Anyone who takes as his subject "the scientific approach to sex" takes on the mind-body paradox that has bedeviled humans since they became humans, and especially during the past couple centuries when the rise of Science has widened the gap, leaving mind and body facing off across an abyss. Papering over that abyss with simple answers and moral superiority is what makes those Reefer-Madness -style abstinence films so silly to us. I would have expected that the director of Gods and Monsters would have had a lighter and deeper touch, not being seduced (like Kinsey himself) into preaching but rather focussing on this universal human conflict.

Manuel and Nelly Lopez are husband and wife, respectively the doctor and nurse for a small French village. Life is an endless busy round as work and home overlap. Nelly tries to squeeze in a day at the beach with the kids while letting Dad sleep late, as he often does — only one day Manuel doesn't wake up. At least the endless round kept things going. A full stop causes a total breakdown, and Nelly loses herself in the tides of circumstances: funeral arrangements, a brother-in-law on the make. Perhaps this film could have used a longer first act in which we see the family in a semblance of "normal" life, or at least got a more rooted sense of the local culture. As it is, Nelly's identity crisis becomes the film's, which is driven to and fro by her own contradictory impulses, coldness, and abstraction. The tense flux makes for a story in which its impossible to get your bearings, know what anyone really wants, and so feels distant and withdrawn, as unsatisfying as the busy, busy life with Manuel that Nelly seems happy to have left behind. The film opens promising enough, with an interesting POV shot of a pigeon flying over the countryside; the director picks up that motif later, with a dog's POV, then inexplicably drops it. Like rest of the film, a hanging detail that doesn't really connect or go anywhere. A collage of colorful paintings on Manuel's plain wooden coffin briefly brightens both the box and a film that is otherwise listless and grey.

I had just read a travel journal in Slate talking about how you're liable to see something so mind-warping and heart-breaking so often in India that you have to find a way to make your peace with it all or basically go insane. I pondered this to the tune of a mournful sitar, watching shots of stone-faced prostitutes on "the Line" in Calcutta's red light district, the camera giving me the perspective of men walking the line as the women look up to see who's going to get picked next. One observer who could not make her peace and remain a hopeless spectator was Zana Briski, a professional photographer from England. Briski went into the red light district in North Calcutta with an idea of not just photographing, but getting to know the women who lived there, trying to understand their world. But she was immediately sidetracked from this plan, drawn instead into the lives of the prostitutes' children.

Once again, detached observation was not enough: "Zana Auntie" became a part of these children's lives, and they hers, because she wanted not just to see them, but to see through their eyes. The way to do that, she decided, was to give them cameras and teach them to take pictures. Calcutta is a terrific photo-opportunity, offering some of the most astonishingly colorful squalor in the world. And so many of the pictures taken by Briski's photo club are knockouts, eventually being exhibited locally, being used in a calandar, even auctioned at Southebys in New York. In this film, the pictures are intercut with video footage of the children taking them, going to class and going about the work and play of growing up as best they can under circumstances they've also had in some way to make peace with. In interviews, the children talk about photography, about each other and about themselves: the girls share their fears of being put into "the line" one day soon, and all of them wonder who they might be if they could get out of their situation. Ten-year-old Puja has sparking eyes and a bold personality that allows her to get so many great shots of street culture in her neighborhood. Avijit is voted the most-promising photographer by the club, with his city scenes, portraits, and shots of architectural features even winning him an invitation to the World Press Photo Exhibition in Amsterdam. The kids are so fresh and innocent, remarkably articulate and well-adjusted — considering the circumstances. Their mothers are prostitutes, often their grandmothers, too. One girl relates how her father once tried to sell her. Manik's father is a hash addict, he says, but "Even then, I try to love him a little."

It comes as no surprise that For Zana Briski, it wasn't enough to see these children's world with their eyes, but to try to take them out of it. She raised money, battled various bureaucracies, and started an organization, Kids With Cameras, trying to get some of the kids out of the brothels and into private boarding schools. Born Into Brothels tells the equal parts heart-breaking and inspiring story of a photographer who got involved with her subjects, but more importantly of little lives with such bright eyes, so much potential but so little hope for the future.