Swoon

Tom Kalin directed this cool and aloof black-and-white study of the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, a case told before in two previous films -- Rope and Compulsion. In 1924, in Chicago, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, two 18-year-olds, kidnapped and murdered the 13-year-old Bobby Franks, ...more

The term "cold exercise in style" may as well have been invented for this harbinger of the New Queer Cinema of the early '90s. As far as arty exercises go, though, Tom Kalin's debut feature remains an eminently watchable one. Filmed in high-contrast black-and-white and set to an uneasy orchestral score, Swoon is based on the original "trial of the century" -- the one that also inspired Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion. Yet by foregrounding what was, to varying degrees, ...more