Silver Dollar Road

While this documentary doesn’t rise to the level of his masterwork “Exterminate All the Brutes,” the pain and anger, resolve, and courage that Peck captures in Silver Dollar Road make it a complex, intense document of the persistence of Black existence in a world hell-bent on erasure.

Some documentaries would be better off as written journalism. Silver Dollar Road complements Presser’s work with Peck’s erudition and humane touch.

Amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.

If your recipe for outrage needs a villainous presence, Peck isn’t interested in stoking it that way, and shouldn’t need to. That’s not the oxygen Silver Dollar Road, building off a 2019 ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, wants to breathe. Rather, it’s the warmth, togetherness and persistence of a family fighting a ruthlessly unfair system, holding onto each other as forces move to expel them.

Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.

When it comes to its central legal struggle, though, it leaves out so many crucial details that it cuts itself off at the knees.