Metacritic reviews

It has not lost an iota of its power to shock, amuse, and simultaneously perplex viewers. If anything, it seems to have grown even bolder with age in its willingness to take on sacred cows in the craziest manner imaginable.

Even if you don’t go in with a conspiratorial mindset, one viewing of this riotously entertaining, chillingly perceptive film could leave you wondering if some larger force is at play, protecting the targets of this should-be New Hollywood classic by keeping it in the dark after all this time.

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.

Don't go to Winter Kills looking for some solemn explanation of the way things are or of how they got this way, or even of what happens in the film itself. It's a comedy, logical response to our times, a film whose reality depends on one's willingness to go along with the uproarious imaginations of Mr. Richert and Mr. Condon.

Richert's direction negotiates the plot's many pleasurably sharp bends with such skill that one emerges a little dazed, more than a little amused, and nagged by a worrying sense that it could just all be true.

Director William Richert has turned Richard Condon's novel about the insanity of the American power structure into a wickedly funny black comedy spiced up by some deliciously off-the-wall performances.

Winter Kills is flawed and screwy and “out there” and the cast is mostly very old, never a recipe for box office success. It’s found its select audience over the decades on home video and streaming, with critics coming along and reviving interest in its bracing set pieces, big laughs and dark, uncomfortable chuckles.

Writer-director William Richert's black comedy about political conspiracy is an amusing forerunner of TV's "Dynasty." [02 Jun 1990]

In keeping with a morality tale on the excesses of wealth and power, it is extravagantly confusing, grandiosely paranoid, flamboyantly absurd and more than a little fun. Though it utterly lacks the internal consistency that "good" movies require, as a wild-goose chase it maintains a certain lunatic fascination. [04 Jun 1979, p.76]

If there's a decent film lurking somewhere in Winter Kills, writer-director William Richert doesn't want anyone to see it in his Byzantine version of a presidential assassination conspiracy [from a book by Richard Condon].