Winter Kills
Filmfest 2006

Sustaining a tone that’s simultaneously funny, scary, and more persuasive than it has any right to be, WINTER KILLS nudges the underworld of power ever so slightly into the realm of the surreal. Mobsters don’t just meet in unglamorous butcher shops; they nest there like so many black-suited crows. WINTER KILLS provides a perfect, absurd finale to the half-decade of post-Watergate paranoid thrillers that preceded it and compares favorably to the grand unified conspiracy-theory fictions that followed, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and James Ellroy’s book American Tabloid. Financed by soft-porn distributors with a sideline in the drug trade, the production continually ran out of money, at one point forcing Richert to make another movie, THE AMERICAN SUCCESS COMPANY, in order to raise funds for its completion. Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com