Winter Kills (1979)

Part 2 of late 70’s American cinema unofficial trilogy of comic strips send offs of the country’s paranoid myths (along with Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover and Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way). Jeff Bridges is the young son of a very Kennedy powerful family…

Filipe Furtado

Something like the Dr. Strangelove of paranoid ‘70s conspiracy thrillers. Obviously, Richert doesn’t have a fraction of Kubrick’s mastery of form, and the convoluted production probably didn’t help. But he still a finds ways to make every scene and character uniquely…

I.V.

One of the ultimate “Only in the 70s” films, with an absolutely stacked cast, and an absolutely bonkers script. A comedy-thriller based on the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, Winter Kills features John Huston doing Chinatown level scene-chewing, and Jeff Bridges…

DallasFrance

This is an absurdly honest depiction of the capitalist class and its motivations, so no wonder it had a notoriously troubled production, messy execution, and pathetic box office showing. Lies, obfuscations, anti-communism, blame-shifting, ties to the mafia, owning the…

Sally Jane Black

What if Thomas Pynchon wrote something about the fallout of the Kennedy Assassination? Baby faced Jeff Bridges runs around a high pitched paranoid thriller as the bodies pile up and a bunch of washed-up Hollywood stars show up: Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Perkins, John…

Justin Decloux

A satirical conspiracy thriller with an all-star cast, Winter Kills is the sort of thing I should enjoy more than I do. The problem is that William Richert is a better screenwriter than a director. Wild Bill, as he has been called, uses too many closeups, lets some scenes…

noir1946

All conspiracy movies from Parallax View to JFK are inherently cartoonish to some extent, but Winter Kills is an almost transgressive farce. After an intriguing milieu involving a president's assassination, a secret gunman, and murder, John Huston's character makes his…

laird

Like a brain damaged telephone game take on JFK conspiracy thriller fan fiction crossed with the most bombastic daytime soap imaginable, this movie is just so much MOVIE that's it's really hard to take 100% seriously. Every acting Titan is in their own world (scratch that:…

Jacob Knight

I highly recommend watching the short documentary on the making of this very strange JFK conspiracy film. Everyone involved seems proud of the film, but I find it to be a bit tonally confused, unsure of whether it is a farce or a dark conspiracy picture. If it’s the former,…

Jamelle Bouie