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Movies 101
KPBX: Friday 6:30pm-7pm | KSFC: Saturday 1pm-1:30pm

Movies 101 began mid-1999, as Spokane Public Radio's KSFC started establishing itself as a separate news and information service. As KSFC matured, so did Movies 101. The show has a loyal fan base and has now also been picked up on KPBX, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM. Movies 101 is currently produced by Spokane Public Radio's Membership & Production Assistant, Cassia Fox.

Latest Episodes
  • Though the possibility, not to mention practicality, of interstellar space travel remains in doubt, that hasn’t stopped moviemakers from exploiting the idea. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the latest sci-fi space venture, “Project Hail Mary,” a Ryan Gosling vehicle based on Andy Weir’s best-selling novel. They also share their choices for, as they like to say, “their favorite space-travel movies that aren’t ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’”
  • The Motion Picture Academy has had its say, and that means that we can now have ours. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the 98th Oscars broadcast, the wins and the shoulda-beens. Then they discusss another music-themed documentary, this one featuring the former Beatle Paul McCartney, Amazon Studio’s “Paul McCartney: Man on the Run.”
  • Forget the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs or the SAG awards, it’s the Oscars broadcast that movie fans care most about. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the 98th Academy Awards, who is nominated, who has the best chances of winning and who they each think should win.
  • As with most art forms, movies depend heavily on tradition—either by embracing it or countering it in new, original ways. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the importance of two cinema giants, artists who in their respective ways represented the best that moviemaking has to offer: the Oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall and the master documentary director Frederick Wiseman.
  • February and March are famously not-great months for new movie releases, with Hollywood dumping some of its most forgettable products into theaters and focusing all its energy on the Academy Awards. But Spokane movie fans are in luck, because they’re about to have access to an embarrassment of cinematic riches from around the world. On this week's show, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the five documentary features vying for the Oscar on March 15th and then preview the upcoming Spokane International Film Festival, running March 6th to 8th.
  • Characters in peril, whether physical and/or emotional, tend to make good movie material, especially when those of us in the viewing audience can relate to what’s going on. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss a pair of movies that feature characters in various stages of duress. The first is the latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel “Wuthering Heights.” They follow that with the wild time-travel venture “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.”
  • We all live in communities of one sort or another, but it’s each of our individual stories that filmmakers tend to explore. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss three movies that focus on characters and how they interact, both positively and negatively, with the communities to which they belong—or, in some cases, merely encounter. They begin with “Magellan,” a film about the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan. And they follow up with “The Plague” and “Peter Hujar’s Day.”
  • It’s been a few years since the feminist MeToo movement took root. Yet it’s still going strong, at least it is in the movie industry. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss three different examples of cinematic woman-power. “Send Help,” starring Rachel McAdams is one. “The Housemaid,” starring Amanda Seyfried and Spokane’s own Sydney Sweeney, is another. And as a third, they add in “A Private Life,” a French film that stars two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster.
  • On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss the recent Academy Awards nominations, the hits, the misses, the utter melodrama of it all. First, though, they take a look at "The Testament of Ann Lee," Mona Fastvold’s look at the woman who founded the offshoot of the Quaker church known as The Shakers.
  • As current events tell us, life—at times—is strange. And one of the most dependable movie themes involves characters who act strangely. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss two films peopled by characters who don’t act in manners that most of us would consider, for want of a better term, normal.