You might be able to check on your ISP's website to see if they offer a newsgroup server. Some of them offers them for free with service, but has a limit on the amount you can download. I use bellsouth dsl and they have news servers with unlimited transfers. You might be able to find free news servers online too, but many of the ones I found were no longer working.
Once you have found one, all you need is a program that will download binaries and decode them. I use GrabIt from
http://www.shemes.com/ . There are many others that will do the same thing. I'm too lazy to browse the various binary groups for the movies and just use
www.newzbin.com to lookup what other people have posted. Also be sure to install QuickPar, which will let you rebuild files that aren't complete. If you use GrabIt, by default it doesn't download or show the incomplete articles. Change the settings to show all articles, and incomplete ones will be in red. If there aren't too many, also download the par files and use QuickPar to repair.
gt40, I believe you use cox internet? You can go to
http://support.cox.com/sdcxuser/asp/cox_main.asp and look under the Learning Center for more info.