It’s no secret that the success or failure of a movie depends largely on how well we can relate to its central characters. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss a pair of films boasting protagonists with wildly diverse appeals. The films are the theatrical release “Fantasy Life” and the streaming feature “Outcome.”

Intensity and tension are important aspects of art. And this is especially true in cinematic art. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss two films that explore the meaning of tension in two different ways. The first is “The Drama,” a study of a couple about to be married who begin to obsess over something from the past. The other is “Crime 101,” an exploration of the lives of several desperate characters, one of whom embarks on a plan to get rich quick.

Some people find foreign films intolerable. Others of us seek them out simply because they tend to offer something different from the usual Hollywood fare. On this week’s show, Dan Webster, Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart discuss two foreign films that are radically unique: the Oscar-nominated Spanish-French film “Sirāt” and the French film “Alpha.”

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.”