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Just like Amazon's 'The Idea of You', this film visits the age-gap romance of the older woman (who's 'normal') with the younger man (who's famous).

Here, in this iteration, the plot is split between the character Zara Ford and her aspirations to produce films and using her celebrity boss, Chris Cole, to get there and her single mother, author/writer Brooke Harwood, who discovers an exciting connection with her daughter's boss.

Romance movies are, at its core, simple tropes and relies on those standard cliches. That's what we love about romance movies. What elevates the basic romance is the chemistry and overall plot that at least tries to throw some 'thing' to make it less typical and a tad more elevated or has decent acting.

Sadly, A Family Affair fails on many fronts. My rating is purely for Kathy Bates as the MIL to Kidman's character, whose husband has been gone 10+ years before, and the daughter, Zara Ford, played by Joey King, who is the PA to an obnoxious, shallow and selfish self-proclaimed movie star.

The number one problem are our leads. The age-gap, a trope in and of itself, is no the problem. There is absolutely zero chemistry between Kidman (who plays Brook Harwood) and Efron (who plays Chris Cole). Not to mention that their very faces are terribly distracting--in that, they've both had so much work done, you can't help but notice it and not really get past it. If there had been decent chemistry between them, all that could be forgiven to a degree.

The second issue is the acting. It's...rather terrible. Especially by Kidman and Efron, the latter whose ability is more Hallmark B-level skills. The only saving grace was King and Bates, who made it even remotely watchable.

I think the plot angle of King's character is actually a fun idea and King executes it brilliantly. She carries the movie. However, the rest of the plot is pretty miserable and nothing to really swoon at.

Also, because this movie came out so soon after Anne Hathaway's similar movie, which also lacked chemistry between its leads, it takes the general winds out of this movie. Ultimately, this did have potential as the plot isn't bad. Who knew that Efron and Kidman would suck and actually hurt the movie vs make it better?

If anything, watch it for Joey King and Kathy Bates.

The Boys in the Boat is based on the true story of the University of Washington's junior rowing team during the Great Depression.

This was film was adapted from the book of the same title and directed by George Clooney and stars Joel Edgerton as Al and Callum Turner as Joe, our main stars.

The film features our main character, Joe Rantz, and the rowing HC, Al Ulbrickson. This is the true story of the team's journey of ragtag and rough group of young men making it to the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I love a wartime, inspiration underdog tale. Who wouldn't?! Overall, this movie is solid. Very solid. What I kept thinking was 'it could have been even better, even Oscar-worthy' if not for a few missteps in the film.

The most glaring and obvious element that Clooney failed to really capitalize on was the relationship between the crew and the team's relationship to their Coach. That should have been the focus. Instead, we get some middling romance between Joe and Joyce, which, frankly, wasn't needed. I don't know if that was a big feature in the book or if it was added to just add 'romance', but it took away from more important things that could have/should have been the real focus.

Another miss was really delving into Joe's character as he had the most screen time but you never really got to know him. I think that's because there was so little character development overall, for all the characters. Not to mention, very little dialogue and even less between any of the characters save a few tidbits between Joe and George (played artfully by Peter Guinness). To be honest, the dialogue was pretty poor, static, and not very dynamic. Sometimes you can learn about characters through how they speak and what they say and how they say it if you don't want to get into a whole backstory. But you don't get any of that. You don't get to know any of the characters beyond the surface. It's a bio-pic of sorts, a human interest story type of film...or maybe I wanted it to be that...but because we don't get the human side, the developed characters, the story becomes about the sport and whatever action can be taken from that.

I get that the 'action' element is important and the 'real' character is actually the sport of rowing and the boat, which came across, but when stories feature the sport over the human story, it become less poignant and the nuance is just zero at that point. The fact that it's during the Depression is almost an afterthought. You also have the background is the '36 Olympics in which Hitler and Nazi Germany is dominating the globe, which was also never fully utilized in an effective or in a remotely dramatic way when that could have provided some much needed and palpable drama.

There was some sprinkling of the politics around the sport and who gets the spot to the Olympics as well as some class depiction, which helped to really drive the point that the boys from Washington were poor and not as affluent as their counterparts that had Ivy money behind them, as well as the favoritism. That part should have been a bit more pronounced as that's where we the whole 'underdog' part of the tale. The odds were against them at every point and yet, they persevered and succeeded.

Had Clooney opted to made it about the people in the story with the background of rowing, Nazi Germany, the Depression, politics/class, I think this would have been out of the park. Like Angelina Jolie's directorial effort in Unbroken--actor directors lack vision and tend to go for the safe route vs really pushing the boundaries, especially creating memorable characters to root for.

In the end, this is still a solid product. Pacing, editing, production, score, etc...all good. Worthy of a watch or two, for sure. It's just unfortunate, the wasted potential of what this film could have been.