Five things to watch this weekend: Celine Dion’s heart goes on via Prime Video, plus Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron get too close for comfort on Netflix

Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.

A Family Affair (Netflix)

There are a bizarre number of unintentional milestones marked by the new Netflix film A Family Affair, starring Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron. For starters, it is the second streaming-only movie to be released in as many months that follows a romance between a well-to-do single mother and her decades-younger celebrity boyfriend, after the Prime Video flick The Idea of You, which had Anne Hathaway in the Kidman role and Nicholas Galitzine as her heartthrob. But A Family Affair also follows The Idea of You in similar but less steamy directions, too.

For starters: Both movies feel so removed from the basic notion of “film” – in their HDTV-flat visuals, uneven performances, too-convenient narratives – that they land as slightly elevated television movies-of-the-week that once upon a time would have starred Teri Hatcher and Ian Somerhalder. And, even more curious, both A Family Affair and The Idea of You take place in a kind of slick and easy superprivileged Los Angeles that immediately drains any speck of dramatic tension from the proceedings, to say nothing of relatability.

In The Idea of You, Hathaway’s art-dealer single mother was somehow dazzled by the luxury trappings of her Harry Styles-esque boyfriend – even though the woman clearly lived in a multimillion-dollar house herself and was no stranger to the finer trappings of her chic Silver Lake neighbourhood in eastern L.A. In A Family Affair, the 1 per cent surroundings are even harder to ignore. How are audiences supposed to convince themselves that Kidman’s bestselling author – who has closets worth of Vogue-approved dresses and a fabulous home overlooking the ocean – is somehow going to be swept off her feet by the privileges and fame of Efron’s movie-star character? I recognize that both films are aspirational fantasy, but they also seem so removed from everyday emotions that the characters and their worlds feel totally alien.

Perhaps the films’ directors – The Idea of You’s Michael Showalter and A Family Affair’s Richard LaGravenese – were each trying to throw back to the immaculate kitchens and living rooms of Nancy Meyers’s rom-coms. But her films, including Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, had enough heart and soul to fill those cavernous foyers and backyard patios.

At this point you might be wondering why A Family Affair is even being included in this week’s list of streaming recommendations. Well, it’s because sometimes audiences need to confront, head-on, just what the streaming giants are churning out – this is such an oddly conceived and executed production that it must be seen to truly understand what the big algorithms think subscribers want. And if it’s easy titillation, unfortunately A Family Affair isn’t going to get you too hot and bothered, either. Whereas The Idea of You had some genuine heat to its love scenes, the chemistry and physical body language between Kidman and Efron here is so chilly and loose as to feel like the cinematic equivalent of Jell-O. Except you should try to not make much room for it.

I Am Celine Dion (Prime Video)

After a quick one-week theatrical run, director Irene Taylor’s intimate documentary following Celine Dion’s medical struggles is now available on Prime Video. I feel as if you already know whether you’re going to immediately rush to watch this film or not, but my colleague Brad Wheeler had some words of both praise and caution to say about the doc after catching it last week: “At its worst, the film is an homage to Dion’s presented indomitability. At its best, it serves as a compelling portrait of a powerhouse performer’s lifeblood love of stage and audience. There is no attempt at bio doc. Dion’s late husband and manager, René Angélil, for example, is not a major part of the story. Dion’s sleepy, well-fed dog, Bear, on the other hand, is immediately a front runner for a Best Pooch in a Supporting Role award.”

Aline (CBC Gem, Hoopla)

If the above-mentioned Prime Video doc doesn’t adequately scratch your Celine Dion itch, perhaps this enchanting and totally bananas film from France’s Valérie Lemercier will do the trick. At the beginning of Aline, a title card appears on-screen noting that the film is “freely inspired” by the life of Dion. Okay, sure, but consider the evidence: The film follows a young Québécois singer named Aline, who comes from a family of 14 children. She becomes a world-famous pop star after becoming a client of her decades-older manager (Sylvain Marcel), whom she eventually marries. She sings several Dion hits, including My Heart Will Go On. And at one point someone mistakenly calls her Celine. But it’s not about Dion. Okay.

Ultimately none of the above points matters in the grand scheme of Aline, because the most outrageous and wonderful thing about the film is how director-writer-star Lemercier chose to make it. In that: She plays Aline/Celine from the ages of 5 through 50. Using a deliberately (?) shoddy combination of makeup, digital effects and other postproduction tricks, Lemercier plays essentially a grown woman trapped in a little girl’s body, like a French-language spin on Martin Short in Clifford. Or, well, I honestly don’t know. It’s certainly worth trying to puzzle out on your own at home.

Ru (Crave)

Especially anxious moviegoers may spend the first half-hour of the new Québécois hit Ru waiting for the other shoe to drop. The film traces the journey of a wealthy Vietnamese family to small-town Quebec after the fall of Saigon, and decades worth of similarly themed culture-shock melodramas have prepared audiences to witness traumatic instances of immigrant suffering – slurs, physical abuse, all manner of prejudice. Yet Charles-Olivier Michaud’s new film, adapting Kim Thuy’s bestselling memoir, has too big a heart for such ugly memories, instead offering a (mostly) warm-welcome story that will win over everyone and anyone.

Rich in period detail and technically slick – a few shots will make you wonder just how large Michaud’s budget was – Ru plays both to and against expectations. The present-day story is largely straightforward, with the pressures of a new life viewed primarily through the perspective of 10-year-old Tinh (Chloé Djandji, projecting a believable sense of wide-eyed intimidation). But then Michaud throws narrative curveballs in the form of stark flashbacks to the family’s escape from their home country. The result is a film that feels both tender and just tough enough, its edges shaved down just so.

I Saw the TV Glow (on-demand, including Apple TV, Amazon, Cineplex Store)

A haunting, evocative and heartbreaking exploration of the adolescent pains that come with figuring out just who you are and who you cannot be, Jane Schoenbrun’s new film fuses the body-horror of David Cronenberg’s sticky oeuvre (notably 1983′s Videodrome) with the rerun-addled memories of a tween who has watched far too much television under far too loose parental supervision. Opening in 1996, the film follows a lonely Grade 7 student named Owen (Ian Foreman) as he stubbornly clings to the background of his drab suburban existence. That is until he strikes up a quiet bond with a Grade 9 student named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who introduces Owen to a television series called The Pink Opaque, and his life changes forever. By the end of the film, Schoenbrun seems ready to snatch the spiked crown from Cronenberg’s head. While it will take more than two features to claim such a cinematic monarchy, the throne is certainly in their sight.