Part prosecution legal brief and part E! biography by way of Frontline, The Trials of Henry Kissinger is a juicy and blistering muckraking documentary. If it adheres to conventional documentary methods — talking heads, narration by actor Brian Cox over newsreel footage — that are refreshingly absent from, say, Michael Moore’s equally disturbing Bowling for Columbine, the film makes up for its pedestrian style with explosive content. Based on British journalist Christopher Hitchens’s 2001 book, the film version has a similar bold agenda, making the methodical case that Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser and Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State is guilty of war crimes for orchestrating secret bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia, for authorizing the 1973 CIA-led coup in Chile that put Augusto Pinochet in power, and for allowing the sale of US weapons to President Suharto of Indonesia that were used in the massacre of civilians in East Timor.

Presenting the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner and revered elder statesman and foreign policy architect as a war criminal akin to Pinochet is pretty damning stuff. So damning, in fact, that Alex Gibney, who has a long résumé including documentaries for HBO and Frontline, and Eugene Jarecki, who has made both documentaries and feature films, couldn’t get this film financed in the US and had to turn to the BBC. The filmmakers bolster their arguments with an A-list of commentators who worked closely with Kissinger or who covered his ascension from academic to international diplomat and media darling. Journalists Seymour Hersh and William Shawcross, and Roger Morris, who worked under Kissinger at the NSC, provide pungent sound bites and insightful observations. Kissinger himself declined to be interviewed; in his defense, the film offers New York Times columnist William Safire and a livid and sputtering General Alexander Haig, who says of Hitchens, "He’s a sewer-pipe sucker! He sucks the sewer pipe!" — a priceless endorsement that ought to find its way onto the movie poster.

The filmmakers’ agenda isn’t just to accumulate evidence attesting to Kissinger’s subversive power games and covert operations that were directly responsible for the killing of civilians. Those have been documented elsewhere. But even as Kissinger is tapped by the president to head a panel on intelligence lapses before September 11, there is a global context for the renewed interest in his dubious legacy: to date, five countries have summoned him to answer questions in connection with the Pinochet trial in London for crimes against humanity (he has responded to none of them). The film is a bit more ambiguous than Hitchens’s book in its portrayal of Kissinger as a war criminal; to its credit, it depicts him not as a mad warmonger but as a cold diplomat obsessed with results who never suffered the consequences of his actions.

Gibney and Jarecki take us through Kissinger’s boyhood in Nazi Germany, the killing of numerous members of his family by the Nazis, and his subsequent escape to America. But rather than making him empathetic to global suffering, or an enemy of Fascist regimes, his childhood, the film posits, turned him into a Machiavellian opportunist who used Cold War diplomacy as a way to subvert international and domestic law. He was enamored of results, regardless of the means; he used manipulation, evasion, and outright lies to satisfy his power lust.

The film gives us abundant footage of Kissinger, including a David Frost interview in which he makes the chilling statement that countries turn Communist because of the irresponsibility of their people. Building their case with recently declassified key documents, Gibney and Jarecki move from the Kissinger/Nixon escalation of the war in Vietnam to the secret bombing of Cambodia, an event, they charge, that led to the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields. The film also makes the connection between Kissinger’s manipulations and machinations and the celebrity he sought, back in the mid to late 1970s, as a "swinger" and a bon vivant who squired starlets about town. The Trial of Henry Kissinger depicts an egomaniac who used the media not just to stroke his supersized ego but to deflect interest from his shady policies and to make himself appear invulnerable.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger may be most valuable, however, for the questions it raises about American hubris and the subversion of international law, questions that resonate today as the Bush administration marches to war. Global responsibility and accountability are not mere ideals, Gibney and Jarecki argue, but the foundation of a democratic society with a humane foreign policy. Whether Henry Kissinger is indeed a war criminal is a question that can, and should, be argued. But this is a film that should jolt the consciences of all who see it.