Winter Kills

An excellent conspiracy thriller of unusual blackness and wit, from a novel by Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honour. A dazzling cast is assembled for its helter-skelter narrative about the brother (Bridges) of a murdered US President, searching for the real assassin and stumbling across the bloodstained pieces of a jigsaw that refuses to be completed. For once the tag of 'any similarity' hardly stands up, since the family patriarch - richly played by Huston, even in red underwear - owns most of America, and the name begins with 'K'. 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.