Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost Review

With Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Ben Stiller dissects legacy, love and loss through his parents’ kismet partnership.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is a profoundly moving documentary on the professional and personal partnership of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. 

Stiller embraces his parents’ legacy at a time when he has proven, now more than ever, he can stand on his own two feet within the industry. The timing of this documentary truly shows how Stiller has made peace with his parents’ legacy, his own sense of autonomy within the entertainment industry and his identity as both a family man and a public figure. Stiller’s film is extraordinarily personal and serves as a resoundingly touching memorial to the lives of his parents.

In 2020, Jerry Stiller passed away just five years after his wife, Anne Meara. The two created the groundbreaking husband-and-wife comedy duo, Stiller and Meara, and made their mark on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their act was a staple of 1960s and ’70s late-night television, pre The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live, where they joked about their marriage, cultural backgrounds and life in New York City together. The comedic trailblazers went on to create a firm legacy, Anne finding success in the Manhattan theater scene and Jerry furthering his television career with his iconic role in Seinfeld. 

When Jerry passed, Ben and his sister Amy were left to clear out their parents’ apartment in order to put it up for sale. In the wake of grief and through the haze of the early stages of the COVID-19 epidemic, Ben and Amy began going through their parents’ things and were met with a gold mine of home videos, archived newspaper clippings and family photos that documented the story of both their parents’ 60-plus-year marriage and the family’s life in the spotlight.

As Ben looked through this archive, he decided he needed to make a film about his parents and their outstanding careers as a way of honoring them. However, as Ben tried to shape the film, the vision of what it was about blurred. He was hit with the profound weight of letting the world into his eclectic childhood and his parents’ marriage in order to craft a full picture of who Jerry and Anne were to him. And then, in the wake of telling their story, he was also confronted by the inability to escape telling his own.

As Ben asked his sister to speak about their parents’ connection and their relationship with fame, he found it only fitting to ask his wife, Christine Taylor, and children, Quinlin and Ella Stiller, to sit down and speak about their experience being a part of the Stiller lineage. The result is a meaningful and moving reflection on the lives of Jerry and Anne as well as a truthful look at the ways in which we find a resounding sense of empathy for our parents as we age. 

With the bountiful archive Jerry left behind, detailing every high and low of his family’s story, Stiller masterfully crafts a film that allows audiences to fall in love with the effortless charm and ferocious wit of his legendary parents. Using archival footage of his parents’ act mixed with interview appearances and their unbelievably funny personal letters to one another, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost beautifully embodies the spirit of Jerry and Anne. 

Part of what makes the documentary work so well is that Stiller does not shy away from talking about their shortcomings. Detailing his mother’s struggles with alcohol and his father’s obsession with fame and legacy adds the depth needed to understand who Jerry and Anne were at their core and how their drives impacted the type of husband and father Ben became. 

Stiller paints an elegant picture of the direct impact his parents had on who he became with a plethora of match cuts that show how similar his childhood, and at times marriage, was to his parents. He speaks with brutal honesty about the ways in which he judged or resented certain aspects of his parents, but fell into the same patterns as them when faced with similar obstacles in life and his career. 

With Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, you feel the weight of a son’s complex relationship with his parents dissipate as he finally is able to not only see, but accept them for who they really are, flaws and all. In revisiting his childhood and looking at events now, really understanding the position his parents were in and having children of his own, the documentary feels like an acknowledgement and thank you to his parents for doing their best with the knowledge they had. 

At one point, the film goes in-depth to discuss how Anne lost her mother at an early age. The documentary says that for the entirety of her career, it feels as if Anne was performing to her mother, who was always one step beyond any audience in front of her. It’s hard after spending the duration of the movie with Stiller to not imagine that he feels the same way about his projects and his own parents. His love of storytelling and filmmaking is so openly inspired by his father and mother and the way they would play with one another while creating. It makes you look at his work with a degree of whimsy, knowing how deeply his artistic passion has been ingrained in him and how personally he connects with the art of storytelling. 

Stiller’s open self-consciousness about telling his parents’ story is both charming and disarming. It invites audiences into the lives of Stiller and Meara in an effortlessly approachable and warmly informal light. While the connection between his parents and upbringing versus his parenting is extraordinarily fascinating, he always ensures he allows his parents and their relationship to have the film’s final bow.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost had its World Premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, 2025. The film will be released in select U.S. theaters on October 17 and globally on Apple TV+ on October 24, 2025.