Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith trace Jeremiah Johnson’s journey from escape into solitude, through an accidental gathering of strangers that becomes a real family, and how its loss traps him in a cycle of violence he never truly recovers from.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith explore how the quiet persistence of women’s work—and a single act of moral courage—reshapes a frontier story built on male bravado.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith explore how The New Land reveals the frontier not as mythic violence but as decades of labor, loss, and quiet perseverance.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith trace how Shane creates a double image of masculinity: the domestic father who builds a home, and the gunfighter who sacrifices himself so that home can exist.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith take a journey into the West’s darkest myth—where family, race, and vengeance shape the American imagination.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith dive into Paul Thomas Anderson’s absurdist epic One Battle After Another, tracing how a botched revolution, an absent mother, and a very tired dad collide into a father–daughter story about surviving the fallout of ideology.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith look at Children of Men as a story about the memory of family at the end of time—a world where nostalgia replaces birth, and the smallest spark of new life becomes a collective act of faith.

Jim Groom and Michael Branson Smith trace the collapse of a patriarch’s paradise, where the dream of self-sufficiency turns into a theology of madness.