There are few living octogenarians who have wielded as much power as Robert McNamara. When a man as influential as this decides it's time to start summing up his life and sharing the lessons, it makes sense to pull up a chair and listen. Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary is all about this great reckoning.

Fog of War, structured around the subtitle's 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara, is a veritable what's what of 20th century American history. McNamara was born to an Irish American family during World War I, himself served for three years in the Second World War, then went back to academia at Harvard briefly before becoming the first person outside the Ford family to serve as President of Ford Motor Corporation. But he was not long for the job; he was soon tapped to be the Secretary of Defense by John F. Kennedy. It was there that he left his deepest marks on American history, advising Kennedy and later Johnson about Vietnam. His position earned him much ire during that tumultuous time from anti-war protestors.

The 11 lessons are simple platitudes - "Empathize with your enemy," and "belief and seeing are often both wrong." But these bland moral imperatives are peppered with hair-raising first-person stories about the real life consequences of McNamara's decisions - such as his involvement in - and rationalization of - killing 100,000 Japanese by firebomb in one single night.

Although the stories he tells are gripping, a viewer might legitimately wonder whether staring at a man in a chair for an hour and a half - even a man with as much to say as McNamara - could conceivably be entertaining. That's where Morris' direction comes in. Although the only interview subject is McNamara (indeed, the only person we see on camera outside of archive footage is McNamara), the film is visually stunning.

There are a few filmic tricks Morris employs that make the film a sheer joy. First, at key points in the film, Morris shows time-lapse photography of the cities being discussed - in Japan and Vietnam in particular. This technique lets us view the cities as they exist today, where the destruction shown in the archive footage has seemingly been healed, but at the same time, shows in the places a ghostly mundanity: we see that these cities are populated by average people going about their lives. It does much to humanize the enemies of past wars.