Critic Reviews

It speaks to the legacy of things that are impossible to record: love, experience, encouragement, a sense of family and belonging that Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller gave to their children, and which continues through them into the next generation.

Stiller and Meara: Nothing is Lost stands not only as Ben Stiller’s best film directorial work in years but also as a very personal keepsake for him and his family. With admiration, respect and honesty, this carefully crafted cinematic family album ensures his parents’ brilliance and love will never fade.

An intriguing, bittersweet family study.

At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries.

Stiller’s approach is musical; his assembly of clips and photos is musical — poetic, not prosaic

Stiller & Meara is a fascinating window into not only the history of this famous family but also the beautiful and punishing nature of performance itself.

It’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.

Life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he’s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he ever could have paid to his parents’ legacy.

In Nothing Is Lost, Stiller uses the public image and private artifacts of the parents he and the world knew quite well, pondering the gap between public and private, along with his own difficulties following in his parents’ footsteps as an artist, a spouse and a father.

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost isn’t just a loving tribute to the great comedy duo of Stiller & Meara; it’s also a beautiful look at how much our closest ones impact us both during their lives and after they're gone.