Understanding America’s foreign policy can be an impossible task, even for those in the know. Yet state secrecy is being eroded daily, and Dirty Wars, now playing at Landmark’s Century Centre, makes transparent what was once clouded. The film highlights the battles secretly and not-so-secretly being waged in the Middle East and North Africa in the name of the U.S., considering them through the experience of journalist and author Jeremy Scahill (Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army). A clinical assessment of the global war on terror, the film is essential to understanding what “war” or even “America” means in the 21st century. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes, and Dirty Wars is a brutal, powerful, and disconcerting shaft of sunlight.