Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘CSI’ now available for Hulu Plus viewers

Sean Axmaker

Hulu Plus continues to make moves into the realm of TV exclusives.

It now has subscription streaming rights to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” which it shares with CBS All Access, the network’s own service (Amazon, iTunes and Vudu offer streaming rentals at $2 an episode). That’s more than 300 episodes of the flagship “CSI” series, from William Petersen’s reign as Gil Grissom to the team under Ted Danson’s D.B Russell, solving crimes in the darkest forensics lab ever created. www.hulu.com/ csi-crime-scene- investigation.

Hulu Plus also has all 10 seasons of “CSI: Miami” (which it shares with Netflix), the sunny crime-fighters-in-paradise alternative to the nocturnal world of casinos, bars and neon lighting of the Las Vegas original. www.hulu.com/ csi-miami.

Pay-per-view / video on demand

Tim Burton’s “Big Eyes” takes on the strange but true story of Margaret Keane (played by Amy Adams), who painted hundreds of portraits of sad-eyed waifs, and her husband, Walter (Christoph Waltz), who took credit for her work and promoted them into a pop culture phenomenon. Adams won a Golden Globe for her performance. It’s PG-13 for language. Also on Blu-ray and DVD.

The Tribeca Film Festival offers three movies through Cable On Demand: “Far From Men,” starring Viggo Mortensen as a French-born teacher caught in the Algerian conflict in the 1950s; the British crime thriller “Hyena” starring Stephen Graham (Al Capone on “Boardwalk Empire”); and documentary “Misery Loves Comedy,” which asks comedians: Do you have to be miserable to funny?

Available the same day as theaters is the drama “Alex of Venice” with Mary Elizabeth Winstead (rated R), and the thriller “Beyond the Reach” with Michael Douglas in the Mojave Desert (rated R).

Also available: the comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” (rated R, with an extended unrated version) and the horror film “The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death” (PG-13).

Netflix

One of the best and most original horror films in years, “The Babadook” raises goosebumps with old-fashioned scares when a monster jumps out of the pages of a disturbing pop-up storybook and terrorizes a single mother and her sweet but exasperating son from the shadows. It’s both powerful metaphor and a genuinely creepy horror movie. www.netflix.com/ WiMovie/70300205.

On the lighter side, here are a couple of movie parodies: “They Came Together,” a spoof of rom-coms with Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as a couple who court their way through clichés, and “Hot Fuzz,” which drops an armed-and-dangerous buddy cop film in a BBC-style murder mystery in a sleepy but sinister English village.

Sean Axmaker is a Seattle film critic and writer. His work appears in Parallax View, Turner Classic Movies online and the “Today” show website. Visit him online at seanax.com.