Oct 16, 2025 7:25pm PT 'Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost' Review: Ben Stiller Directs an Unexpectedly Moving Documentary About His Famous Comedian Parents It's a portrait of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara's life as a comedy team, but more than that it's a touching portrait of their complicated love. By Owen Gleiberman Plus Icon Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic @OwenGleiberman Latest Remembering Diane Keaton, Whose Radiance Set Every Character She Played Aglow 5 days ago 'Is This Thing On?' 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Stiller and Meara were quite successful, but I wouldn't call them superstars. I used to see them on TV when I was growing up, and it doesn't take long for the film to capture the sweet-and-sour novelty of their stand-up sketch-comedy repartee - the way their affectionate but spiky interchanges, rooted in the stark contrast of their personalities (he was a Jewish crank who was like the missing link between Alan Arkin and Al Goldstein; she was a sunny Irish lass with a tart tongue), looked ahead to the age of "Annie Hall." Related Stories Shu Qi's 'Girl,' Zhang Lu's 'Gloaming in Luomu' Take Top Honors as Busan Closes First-Ever Competition Five Takeaways From Busan's Milestone 30th Edition We see a telling clip of Johnny Carson, sometime in the late '60s, saying, "They're married in real life! He's Jewish and she's Irish - for real," and his eyes light up with amazement. That's how unusual it was, at the time, to see a showbiz couple drawn from such different wells. That said, Stiller and Meara, while they had a fresh and even trend-setting image, always came off, at least to me, as a likable but rather lightweight comedy team. Popular on Variety As the documentary captures, there was an edge of conviction to their act, because they drew it from their own lives, and their love and (at times) acrimony would spill right onto the stage. Yet Stiller and Meara were launched in the pre-counterculture era of Nichols and May and Mel Brooks' 2,000 Year Old Man, and by the time they became a TV staple, there was something a tad corny and dated about them. In the documentary, we see their two greatest routines, a satire of computer dating that they first performed in 1966, and their "Hate" sketch, which was way ahead of its time. But once you've chuckled at those, there isn't much left to discover about them as comedians. It's hardly a surprise, however, that "Stiller & Meara" treats the two of them like gods on the comedy Olympus. The film was directed by Ben Stiller, who is their son, so yes, he's a bit close to the subject. What he's put together has to be reckoned a definitive look at the career of Stiller and Meara. At the same time, the documentary is a tender but clear-eyed family portrait. It was shot starting after Jerry's death, in 2020 (Anne Meara died in 2015), and much of it consists of the lean, warm, now silver-haired Ben Stiller and his curly-haired acerbic older sister, Amy, hanging out in the vast Upper West Side apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and W. 84th St. in which the two of them grew up, and where their parents spent most of their lives together. The apartment is jammed with memorabilia and bric-a-brac, because Jerry Stiller was a pack rat when it came to recording his life - he was into taping conversations, he always had a camera out (that's how Ben first started to make films as a kid), and "Stiller & Meara" shows us a lot of this stuff: the home movies, the diaries, the personal notes, the recordings of the everyday. (It's this that the film's rather bland subtitle, "Nothing Is Lost," refers to.) The family comes off, relatively speaking, as quite a happy foursome. It's clear throughout the documentary that Jerry and Anne genuinely loved each other, and that they provided a nurturing and creative environment for their two children. Ben and Amy recall their parents with a richly amused understanding of the couples' foibles (especially Jerry's, since he practically wore them on his lapel), and while it's nice to see a high-powered showbiz family that seems so wel