Measured in its outrage and rigorous in its execution, Kirby Dick’s deeply unsettling documentary pulls back the curtain on the epidemic of sex crimes in the US military. And while the statistics he uncovers are undeniably shocking—more than 20% of female veterans were raped while serving their country—the film’s true impact comes from Dick’s compassionate depiction of the individual stories behind those galling numbers. Not only have these women been heinously betrayed by their supposed "band of brothers" (a dynamic that makes these assaults akin to incest), they’ve faced appalling reprisals after reporting their attacks. At every turn, their pleas for help have fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile, military officials preposterously assure anyone who’ll listen that they have a strict "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to sexual assault. And honestly, after seeing the awareness campaign they’ve devised—posters advising, "Don’t risk it! Wait until she’s sober!"—who could possibly doubt that they have the situation well in hand?

"Kirby Dick has become one of the indispensable muckrakers of American cinema, zeroing in on frequently painful stories about how power functions in the absence or failure of accountability… the violations chronicled in The Invisible War are compounded by a deep and terrible betrayal, which ripples outward from the various branches of the service into the society as a whole. This is not a movie that can be ignored."—A.O. Scott, The New York Times