Ben Stiller looks at his parents

 Watching Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost sometimes feels as if you're sitting through 98 minutes of therapy -- not yours but a session belonging to Ben Stiller, who directed this engagingly introspective documentary about his parents. The movie chronicles the careers of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, a comedy duo that rose to prominence in the 1960s, receiving a major boost from frequent appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ben Stiller, 59 and now a star in his own right, joins his sister Amy to clean out their parents' Manhattan apartment after Jerry passed away in 2015 at the age of 92. Anne died five years earlier at the age of 85. The couple had been married for 60 years. Jerry Stiller, we learn, did a lot of filming and taping of his family, and their West Side apartment brims with personal and career memorabilia. Growing up in a show-business dominated household isn't easy, and some of the problems -- an overly intense a focus on work, for example -- passed from Jerry and Anne to Ben, whose wife, Christine Taylor-Stiller, and kids also appear in the film. Despite the difficulties of being the children of people whose careers dominated their lives, neither Ben nor his sister seems irreparably harmed, and the movie emerges as a love story (Ben for his parents, and Jerry and Anne for each other) that navigates enough difficulties to keep it percolating: Jerry's perfectionism and Anne's alcoholism, for example. So we get a double hit here: a biopic about Stiller & Meara, him Jewish and her Irish, and a look at Stiller grappling with his relationship with his parents. That means Stiller has hold of something that goes beyond show business: The idea of children trying to understand their parents and, in the bargain, themselves.