Film: Material Witnesses: “An itemized casualty list of calamities across multiple nations, The Trials of Henry Kissinger is something of a microcosm of the 2002 Human Rights Watch festival itself. Condensing Christopher Hitchens’s enraged deposition into 80 lucid minutes, directors Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki map out Kissinger’s collusions with Nixon and Ford in the short-circuiting of the ’68 Paris peace talks, secret bombing of Cambodia, upending of democracy in Chile, and savaging of East Timor. The revered elder statesman becomes Machiavellian tyrant-as-apparatchik, driven equally by chillingly abstract realpolitik and panting power lust. Hitchens & co. sometimes press their case too hard (as when they posit Kissinger as the virtual lone gunman who distended the American war in Vietnam by four years) and remain hazy on the logistics of charging him in international court. Quibbles aside, though, Trials is an indispensable primer on U.S. foreign policy—especially during wartime.” The Village Voice