the trip coogan and brydon

Advertisement

Supported by

Movie Review | ‘The Trip'

2 Pairs of Sharp Elbows On White Tablecloths

• Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

• June 9, 2011

In contrast to Roger Corman’s 1967 freakout, “The Trip,” no hallucinogens are harmed in the Michael Winterbottom comedy of the same title, a British road movie laced with lacerating laughs and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon . Mr. Coogan does, in fact, smoke a joint, lighting up in the same house where Coleridge wrote “Dejection: An Ode” and indulged in opium, the soporific that enslaved him in “humiliation and debasement.” Mr. Coogan has made a career partly by riffing on narcissism and he’s in fine self-loving form, as is Mr. Brydon. For one man, the humiliation of choice here is fame (with a debasement chaser), while for the other it’s his incessant vocal mugging. Both give you a contact high.

The duo’s dueling funnymen routine will be familiar if you’ve seen a few of Mr. Winterbottom’s earlier films, including “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,” or were in Britain last fall and caught “The Trip” when it was a six-part BBC2 television series . The title, premise and almost everything else in both the big- and small-screen versions are identical because, well, they’re essentially the same , save for the movie’s abbreviated length (111 minutes) and some gags lost in translation. To rewind: Mr. Coogan accepts a gig from The Observer of London to review six restaurants in northern England. He plans to take his (pretend) girlfriend, Mischa (Margo Stilley), but is forced, with demonstrable reluctance, to ask Mr. Brydon instead. Straightaway, the two friendly combatants are motoring out of London in a Range Rover, maps and gags at the ready.

As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery). They also eat, of course, often and well, dining in restaurants where the rooms and service are hushed and the dishes extravagantly conceptualized and prepared. (With The Observer paying, money isn’t an issue.) There are gardens of vegetables, oceans of seafood, a veritable abattoir of meat. At the Cumbrian restaurant L’Enclume (one Michelin star), the near-parodic haute and low offerings include lollipops “made out of duck fat with peanuts” (“Why not?” Mr. Coogan muses) and some foamy pea-green ick made from mallow, ginger beer and whiskey and served in a martini glass.

“The consistency,” Mr. Coogan says after braving a sip, “is a bit like snot.” Pause. “But it tastes great.”

In between the truffle ravioli and Burgundy, the vocal caricatures and Lake District landscapes, Mr. Coogan and Mr. Brydon goad each other with prickly jokes and smiled insults all while comparing their successes, reciting poetry and walking the moors, as well as an occasional tightrope. Sometimes the camaraderie edges into aggression that is soon snuffed out with laughter. Mr. Coogan’s stated desire to act for film-art “auteurs,” is one well-chewed bone they tug at, as is Mr. Brydon’s populist appeal. Since they worked with Mr. Winterbottom in his 2002 film “24 Hour Party People,” Mr. Brydon has continued to blow up bigger in Britain, while Mr. Coogan’s Hollywood future has dimmed (his star turn in “Around the World in 80 Days” went nowhere), developments that give “The Trip” a sting of truth.

Oh, how Mr. Coogan aches for celebrity. Or at least that’s what his on-screen character yearns for. It’s unclear which is which, who is who, and that’s part of the journey — the destination too. To the extent that the man at the wheel (Mr. Coogan) and the guy riding shotgun (Mr. Brydon) are playacting is a question that Mr. Winterbottom and his stars enjoyably bat around. Does it matter where a performer ends and the persona begins, or if the two can be separated? In “The Trip” you search for authenticity among the jokes and lulls, but what you get is what you see and hear: Mr. Coogan sniping, eating and whining, endlessly whining, about the size of his rooms, the state of his career, and Mr. Brydon a blissful foil. It’s plenty real.

Even so, it’s impossible to know if Mr. Coogan is honestly wounded and if Mr. Brydon is as cheerfully impervious to insult as he appears. It’s easier to guess: maybe so. In one scene Mr. Coogan tries to mimic Mr. Brydon’s popular “small man in a box” voice and its tiny peeping, but fails. Looking into a mirror, Mr. Coogan says with strangled effort — addressing his twin self, the one perhaps responsible for great Coogan creations like Alan Partridge — “I don’t care about silly voices.” It’s a perfect encapsulation of the contradictions and sad-funny neediness that “The Trip” gets at so well and a moment that Mr. Winterbottom almost blows with the tinkling piano that creeps onto the soundtrack whenever things turn self-consciously serious. There’s no need to milk the tears when, like the laughs, they’re already flowing.

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom; director of photography, Ben Smithard; edited by Mags Arnold and Paul Monaghan; music by Michael Nyman; produced by Andrew Eaton and Melissa Parmenter; released by IFC Films. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Steve Coogan (Steve), Rob Brydon (Rob), Claire Keelan (Emma), Margo Stilley (Mischa), Rebecca Johnson (Sally), Dolya Gavanski (Magda) and Kerry Shale (Steve’s United States Agent).

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Finally Getting the Girl (or Guy) : Western pop culture has often emasculated Asian male characters. A new crop of romantic lead roles  are starting to offer alternatives.

Eve Hewson Finds Her Own Fame : The actress, who is the daughter of the U2 frontman Bono, is not yet a household name herself, but that could soon change .

Oscar Buzz for a Trans Actress : Karla Sofía Gascón wowed Cannes in “Emilia Pérez” as a drug kingpin who undergoes gender-affirming surgery. Is the academy next ?

Streaming Guides:  If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Watching Newsletter:  Sign up to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows  to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

A British comedy that has the finest Michael Caine-impression showdown in cinematic history.

Read an “ Interrogation ” with Steve Coogan. 

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip (IFC Films), a peripatetic comedy about two comedians on a jaunt around the north of England, alternately amuses, bores, and annoys, just like its two hilariously intolerable protagonists. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, both fortysomething British comics with a long list of TV series and films to their credit, play semi-fictionalized versions of themselves. Coogan, known for his hugely successful BBC sitcom I’m Alan Partridge , is a career-obsessed serial womanizer who frets that he’ll never be taken seriously as an actor. Brydon, a married man with a new baby, is less visibly consumed by insecurity, but his compulsion to do vocal impressions at every moment of the day borders on the pathological (a symptom Coogan is ever keen to point out).

On a vaguely defined assignment for a newspaper, Coogan has been sent to the picturesque Lake District to review six high-end restaurants. When his girlfriend backs out at the last minute, Coogan invites Brydon instead, making it clear that he tried and failed to get several other friends to come along first. And so the two men, who inhabit a limbo somewhere between friends, colleagues, and rivals, set out in Coogan’s Range Rover to explore the land of Romantic poets and the Brontë sisters. By day, Coogan, an aspiring outdoorsman—as he enjoys mentioning to attractive hotel employees, he’s brought along some crampons—drags Brydon on ill-planned hikes or visits to literary sites like Bolton Abbey, where Brydon declaims Wordsworth’s poem of the same name in the stentorian tones of Ian McKellen. By night, they alight at various swank country inns, where they dine on elaborate but singularly unappetizing-looking dishes, such as a greenish vegetable cocktail whose taste Brydon praises even as he compares its consistency to snot.

During the dull stretches of The Trip , which are not infrequent, I passed the time musing about what Winterbottom was doing making a movie like this. This shape-shifting director seems to make a film nearly every year, from playful literary adaptations like the delightful Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (which also starred Coogan and Brydon) to dramas inspired by contemporary global events ( In This World , A Mighty Heart) to period noir thrillers ( The Killer Inside Me ). For my taste, Winterbottom is a bit too prolific. His 9 Songs , a freewheeling, sexually explicit account of a couple’s affair over the course of a year, felt like a fitfully inspired sketch rather than a finished movie, and the same could be said of The Trip , which floats ideas for character arcs (Coogan’s compulsion to seduce women, Brydon’s inability to speak in his own voice) that never get developed.

But during the film’s funny stretches, as when Brydon and Coogan get into a loud public row about who does the better Michael Caine , I was laughing too hard to care about unexplored character arcs. (Brydon’s demonstration of the way Caine’s voice has retreated into the back of his throat as he ages is a particularly stunning feat of vocal mimicry.) These are two naturally hilarious men, and when they get rolling—especially when they’re literally rolling, trapped in the confines of Coogan’s car—they can spin comic gold out of nothing at all: a few lines of Coleridge read from a guidebook, an imagined scene from a Braveheart -style costume drama: “Gentlemen, to bed, for we ride at dawn! … Or nine-thirty-ish.”

The Trip was originally conceived as a series for British television, a context in which its rambling episodic structure—another day, another country inn—makes more sense. If the notion of being trapped in a car for two hours with two brilliant, self-centered comedians sounds like a bit much, The Trip is also available on IFC on demand. There you can enjoy Brydon and Coogan’s improvisations the way they sip that dubiously textured vegetable cocktail, just a little at a time.

• Entertainment

The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon Make Great Impressions

I n the long history of man’s need to battle with and dominate his fellow men, is there any competition so intense as two funny guys trying to impress each other? Beyond arm wrestling, beyond sumo wrestling, comic oneupsmanship demands killer instinct as much as ready wit. The can-you-top-this? exchanges spark pleasure and challenge in the jesting jousters, until one combatant may signal defeat with a gentlemanly “Well done, sir,” or by slinking into silence or out of the room.

In Michael Winterbottom’s semi-improv, semi-real comedy The Trip , Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play out this atavistic animosity through the dead-serious game of celebrity impressions. As Brydon, a voice actor and host of the BBC TV comedy quiz show Would I Lie to You? , launches into a medley of Welsh-actor imitations, Coogan, the English TV star who has also appeared as a supporting actor in Ben Stiller movies ( Night at the Museum, Tropic Thunder ), sourly observes that “Anyone over 14 who amuse themselves by doing impressions needs to take a long hard look in the mirror.” Yet the two are instantly doing dueling Michael Caines: Coogan emphasizing Caine’s nasality, Brydon the lower, slower diction that comes from decades of “all the cigars and brandy.” Round one to Rob.

(Submarine: From Teen Angst to Pure Delight)

They are having lunch at a posh Midlands restaurant — the film’s slim premise is that Coogan has been assigned by The Observer to spend a week sampling upscale eateries up North — and the almost-star is not in the best mood. His girlfriend, whom he’d planned to take on the trip, has abruptly left for the States; Brydon is her last-minute replacement. Coogan is also agitated about his stalled movie career. On the phone, his agent assures him, “You’ve got a huge amount of momentum,” and Coogan mopes, “Yeah, you get momentum when you go downhill.” The Hollywood break he hoped for might come when he played the director in Tropic Thunder , except that the character was blown up 10 minutes into the movie. (Here, Stiller has a cameo guest shot in one of Coogan’s dark dreams.) We see that the easy-going, happily married Brydon is performing his vocal capers at least in part to perk up his glummish pal — an attempt that depresses Coogan even further.

Coogan made his name playing a TV personality named Alan Partridge, first on the Radio 4 news parody On the Hour and its TV spinoff The Day Today , then on his own fake chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge . Oily, bluff, bullying, insecure, misogynistic and, as he described himself, “homoskeptic,” Partridge was a living satire of small-screen smugness and desperation. Brydon has his own unreality comedy series, Rob Brydon’s Annually Retentive , playing an exaggerated version of himself as a quiz-show host. The two actors also played variations on their public personas in Winterbottom’s 2005 film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story , which devolved into a backstage farce that put embarrassing elements of Coogan’s own tabloid life to cuttingly comic use.

The question about The Trip , especially for Americans ignorant of the stars’ TV work, is how much of their self-named characters is true and how much fake? I’d say the movie is faux-fake, a fiction sprung from reality — for, whatever or whoever Coogan may be, he creates a character making jokes on the brink of despair, ever on prowling for sexual conquests to slake his loneliness, and looking at Brydon with a seething blankness that looks as if he’s straining to both stifle his rage and stay awake. The British Academy must have thought so too: Coogan won this year’s BAFTA award for Best Male TV Comedy Performance. They realized he was brilliantly playing a sad, frustrated guy named Steve Coogan.

(Summer Entertainment Preview 2011)

The project was conceived as a six-part BBC series, which aired last fall. For the theatrical version, Winterbottom has edited the show’s just-under-three hours down to just under two hours. Both the show and the film offer nothing much more than two men talking — in the car, at the restaurant-inns or while visiting local landmarks. That’s easy to take as a half-hour interlude seen weekly, and a treat to watch in snippets on YouTube (where many of the impression bits can be found). It may run the risk of wearying its viewers when they consume it in one gulp. But I think Winterbottom wants the audience to share a bit of Coogan’s restlessness and exasperation at Brydon’s nonstop mimicry, and his envy at his friend’s ability to enthrall two young women with his impressions. “You can’t treat your entire life like a Radio 4 panel show,” Coogan warns Brydon, who immediately sounds a “Bzzt!” — the noise of a game-show buzzer indicating a wrong answer — and says, “Yes, you can,” with a triumphant smile.

And yes, the film lets him. Brydon reads a Times restaurant review in the voice of Anthony Hopkins; declaims Wordsworth’s “Bolton Abbey” in the reedy timbre of Ian McKellen; does Woody Allen as he might sound if channeled through the voice of the late English comedian Les Dawson. He summons up Tom Jones, Hugh Grant, Billy Connolly, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man . Coogan and Brydon both have a go at Al Pacino in Heat and those matching James Bonds, Sean Connery and Roger Moore. When Coogan goes frozen-faced as a 007 villain ( “Come, come, Mr. Bond, you get just as much pleasure from killing as I do”), Brydon observes, “You look like you’re recovering from a stroke and getting mobility again.” And if a marathon of two Brit Rich Littles doesn’t appeal, attend to the pair’s inspired improvs of a medieval hero leading his troops to battle, or of their exegesis of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Says Coogan to Brydon: “I would have thought you’d have preferred Olivia Newton John’s version of Xanadu .”

At the beginning of their week’s sojourn, Brydon suggests they stop to dine at an ordinary place serving food eaten by real people. When Coogan demurs that that’s been done before, Brydon says, “It’s 2010. Everything’s been done before. All you can do is do something that someone’s done before but do it better or different.” The Trip may have familiar elements — it’s pretty much My Dinner With Andre pinned to the plot of Alexander Payne’s Sideways — but the badinage provides an immediate and lasting kick, as well as the spectacle of two champion combatants at the top of their game.

Top 10 Superhero Movies

See the 100 best movies of all time.

More Must-Reads from TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024
• Inside the Rise of Bitcoin-Powered Pools and Bathhouses
• How Nayib Bukele’s ‘Iron Fist’ Has Transformed El Salvador
• What Makes a Friendship Last Forever?
• Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
• Your Questions About Early Voting , Answered
• Column: Your Cynicism Isn’t Helping Anybody
• The 32 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

Contact us at [email protected]

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

On location: ‘The Trip to Italy’ with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon

• On location: ‘The Trip to Italy’ with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on x (opens in a new window)
• On location: ‘The Trip to Italy’ with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on facebook (opens in a new window)
• On location: ‘The Trip to Italy’ with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• On location: ‘The Trip to Italy’ with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

By Joanne O’Connnor

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

It might seem an unlikely format for a comedy series but The Trip , which saw Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon eating their way around northern England while indulging in unscripted banter and competitive Michael Caine impersonations, was a big hit. Now the pair are back for a second helping, against the somewhat sunnier backdrop of the Italian coast.

On location

The six-part series follows Coogan and Brydon as they embark on a road-trip from Piedmont, in the north of Italy, south to Capri. Ostensibly, they are travelling in the footsteps of romantic poets Shelley and Byron but, in reality, the food is the star of the show. The trip starts with a lingering lunch at the acclaimed Trattoria della Posta ( trattoriadellaposta.it ) in Langhe, 40km east of Cuneo, where they try guinea fowl and the local Barolo wine.

In a nod to The Italian Job (1969), the pair have chosen a Mini Cooper for their journey through sun-soaked vineyards. Elite Rent-a-Car ( eliterent.com ) hires out four different Mini models in Italy, including convertibles like the one driven by Coogan and Brydon (from €140 a day).

There’s time for a brief stop at Byron’s house in Genoa before heading south to the Italian Riviera and the charming seaside village of Camogli, where terracotta-coloured houses cling to steep hillsides overlooking the aptly named Golfo Paradiso. Nearby, the fishing hamlet of San Fruttuoso is a picture-perfect setting for a plate of fritto misto on the beach at La Cantina ( www.lacantinasanfruttuoso.it ).

Continuing their grand tour, Coogan and Brydon drive through the rolling hills of Tuscany, before stopping off in Pisa and then Rome, where they visit the Protestant Cemetery where Shelley’s ashes are buried, the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps, and enjoy a meal at German chef Oliver Glowig’s two Michelin-starred restaurant ( oliverglowig.com ) near Villa Borghese.

Next stop is the Amalfi coast, where the highlights include a visit to Pompeii and a long, boozy lunch on the terrace of the elegant Villa Cimbrone hotel in Ravello. The trip ends in Capri with yet another memorable meal, this time at Il Riccio, the breezy seafront restaurant of the Capri Palace Hotel.

Where to stay

In Camogli, Brydon and Coogan stayed at the seafront Cenobio dei Dogi ( www.cenobio.it ), which has elegant bedrooms and access to a private beach (doubles from €190). Villa Cimbrone ( villacimbrone.com ) in Ravello, a medieval palazzo perched above the Gulf of Salerno, has played host to many illustrious guests, from Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence to Winston Churchill (doubles from €360). The Capri Palace Hotel ( capripalace.com ) is the grand dame of Italian hotels, with a spa, Michelin-starred restaurant and exclusive beach club (from €395). Tour operator Citalia ( citalia.com ) can provide a tailor-made self-drive holiday from Liguria to Capri with prices from £1,335pp for nine nights.

‘The Trip to Italy’ is being screened by the BBC in the UK; it will be shown in Australia and the US next month, and other countries later in the year

Promoted Content

Follow the topics in this article.

• Life & Arts Add to myFT
• Travel Add to myFT
• Europe holidays Add to myFT
• Arts Add to myFT
• BBC Add to myFT

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 77% Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Link to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• 98% Rebel Ridge Link to Rebel Ridge
• 95% Strange Darling Link to Strange Darling

New TV Tonight

• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4
• 97% English Teacher: Season 1
• 91% Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist: Season 1
• 100% Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos: Season 1
• 58% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
• -- Tell Me Lies: Season 2
• -- Outlast: Season 2
• -- The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Season 1
• -- Selling Sunset: Season 8
• -- Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Season 14

Most Popular TV on RT

• 74% Kaos: Season 1
• 83% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 89% Terminator Zero: Season 1
• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 93% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4 Link to Slow Horses: Season 4
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

59 Best Football Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer

Best Hulu Series To Watch Right Now (September 2024)

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Cast on Reuniting with Tim Burton

New Movies and TV Shows Streaming in September 2024: What to Watch on Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Max and more

• Trending on RT
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• Top 10 Box Office
• Venice Film Festival
• Popular Series on Netflix

Where to Watch

Rent The Trip on Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Amiable, funny and sometimes insightful, The Trip works as both a showcase for the enduring chemistry between stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon and an unexpected perusal of men entering mid-life crises.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Michael Winterbottom

Steve Coogan

Paul Popplewell

Margo Stilley

Claire Keelan

More Like This

Related movie news.

• Login / Sign Up
• Entertainment

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s Trip movies dig deep into the anxieties of travel

Their adventures in angst are a sure cure for wanderlust

If you buy something from a Polygon link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

by Karen Han

Part of the appeal of travel movies and shows is the way they let the audience travel vicariously. At its best, travel entertainment can be educational, teaching viewers about places they haven’t been and cultures that might be foreign to them. But an undeniable draw is still the chance to admire beautiful scenery and plan to go there someday — or at least feel like you’re there, now that the COVID-19 pandemic has made leaving home such a safety risk. One travel series may actually help curb that sense of wanderlust, though: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip .

The two actors, playing exaggerated versions of themselves, have now starred in four Trip movies, each edited together from six-episode TV series. 2010’s The Trip took them around the north of England, while 2014’s The Trip to Italy , 2017’s The Trip to Spain , and the new and final installment, The Trip to Greece , all have self-explanatory names. On each trip, Coogan and Brydon take a restaurant tour, passing through beautiful scenery and dining on mouth-watering food. If anything, the series should make travel irresistible.

But Coogan, Brydon, and director Michael Winterbottom actually pull off something more impressive: They make the trips seem fun, but also sad, frustrating, and even lonely. Traveling doesn’t solve the problems Coogan and Brydon are dealing with in their home lives. A vacation may be an attempt to take a break from personal issues, but there’s no way to completely leave them behind. Their troubles may be worlds away from viewers’, as their lives as successful actors are hardly normal, but they become accessible through their open portrayals. The honesty Winterbottom captures about the problems of celebrities — who should theoretically be so well off that they wouldn’t have a care in the world — and their more domestic worries, such as providing for their families or finding work, aren’t that far removed from the average person’s concerns.

The most commonly referenced element of the Trip movies are Coogan and Brydon’s dueling impressions of figures ranging from Michael Caine to the Batman villain Bane. However, Winterbottom also uses these trips to dig deeper, using the two actors’ journeys through historical landmarks as a pretext for them to interrogate their own mortality. Coogan is unmarried and free to become romantically entangled abroad (he’s seen both attempting to and succeeding in currying the favor of women he meets), but he struggles to connect with his children and to combat feelings of impermanence. Brydon is happily married, and can’t go as wild as Coogan does while traveling, but he has an anchor in his family.

The two of them also want to be taken more seriously, not just seen as comedians. As they travel, they deal with that desire in different ways. Coogan constantly refers to his Oscar-nominated script for the 2013 film Philomena to prove his success, but finds that nobody cares much about it. His profile hasn’t risen much at all in the seven years since that movie: His calls to his agent about new work get redirected to an assistant. Brydon, who hasn’t done as much dramatic work, reassures himself with the fact that he’s achieved stability, and that his legacy will be carried on through his children. Under Winterbottom’s direction, the pair’s comic stylings often give way to such introspection, and moments of silence and solitude.

Even though they’re on the most marvelous trips imaginable, it’s clear that scenic vistas and haute cuisine alone aren’t enough to make Coogan and Brydon feel fulfilled. Their problems don’t magically go away because they’re abroad, and though they get along, they sometimes bristle at each other, too, as is almost inevitable when traveling with company. (For a more explicit, condensed version of the lessons they’re expressing, try the recent Saturday Night Live sketch where Adam Sandler plays an exhausted tour-company host: “If you’re sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.”)

Watching the movies is a delight, though. Each installment of the series feels like checking in on old friends, if your old friends were two of the sharpest comedians alive. The rapport between Coogan and Brydon is so genuine — they’re already so invested in each other — that the audience becomes a third guest on the trips rather than a voyeur. That feeling of inclusion and closeness makes the usual vicarious experience of a travel series even more potent. During a global pandemic, however, that ability to travel along with the hosts is a blessing for a different reason.

As appealing as being anywhere but home might seem right now, it’s reassuring to remember that traveling has its ups and downs, too. The Trip movies capture that balance through the (new and pre-existing) crises that the fictionalized versions of Coogan and Brydon experience. Winterbottom never goes so far as to make traveling seem abjectly awful — who wouldn’t want to escape to a beach right now, if it could be done safely? — but he makes it clear that no getaway will be completely perfect, either. As the wait for a coronavirus vaccine stretches on, the reminder that something that seems like a perfect reprieve has its flaws, too, comes as a relief.

The Trip to Greece will be available on VOD on May 22.

Apple TV 4K

Apple’s 4K streaming device supports 4K HDR and Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 surround sound.

Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy .

Most Popular

• Astro Bot finally gives PlayStation a Nintendo-tier platformer after 30 years
• Daggerheart, a new Critical Role game, feels more complicated than D&D in a good way
• Two ways to save a video game industry on fire
• Did Beetlejuice 2’s writers abandon ship halfway through?
• Remedy replacing Bowie song from Alan Wake over 'licensing'

Patch Notes

The best of Polygon in your inbox, every Friday.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Movies

The Latest ⚡️

‘The Trip to Greece’ Is the Last ‘Trip’ Film. But It Shouldn’t Be (Column)

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga Star in a Cracked Jukebox Musical — but It Doesn’t Let Joker Be Joker Enough 1 day ago
• ‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Shows a Whole New Side in Luca Guadagnino’s Bold and Trippy Adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Ahead-of-Its-Time Novel 2 days ago
• ‘The Room Next Door’ Review: Tilda Swinton Gives a Monumental Performance as a Woman Confronting Death in Pedro Almodóvar’s First English-Language Drama 3 days ago

I’m an unabashed fan of “The Trip” and its three sequels. They’re the British talk-verité road comedies in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon , playing heightened versions of their quicksilver acid-tongued middle-aged selves, drive around some lovely European country (England, Italy, Spain, Greece), stopping for lavish lunches at Michelin-star restaurants as they slice and dice each other’s egos with the quippiest of thoughts — a one-upmanship game between frenemies that periodically bursts out into their dueling impersonations of some legendary movie star. (The most hilarious was Michael Caine. They’ve also done indelible takeoffs on Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Sean Connery, Woody Allen and Hugh Grant.)

It’s hard to pinpoint what it is that gives the “Trip” movies their special tang, but the whole rapid-fire competitive banter of Coogan and Brydon, most of which they make up on the spot, reminds me of the razzing prankishness of “A Hard Day’s Night” with a touch of the conversational enchantment of “My Dinner with Andre.” These are comedies to take seriously (though not too seriously). They’re also dramas to take lightly.

Related Stories

Summer Box Office Success Stories Weren’t Just Tentpoles

Inside Demi Moore’s Glorious Return: How She Conquered Her Fears for a Career-Best Performance in ‘The Substance’ 

And now, it seems, they’re going to be missed.

Popular on Variety

With the release, on May 22, of “The Trip to Greece,” Coogan, Brydon and their director, Michael Winterbottom , have announced that they’re packing it in. There will be no more “Trip” movies — at least, for a good long time. Each of the four films, going back to “The Trip” in 2010, was carved out of a six-episode BBC series (each series, in total, is about one-and-a-half times longer than the film it was whittled down to). To do another movie, they would need, theoretically, to do another series, and that’s not in the cards.

Yet I think that letting go of the films now is a mistake. Sure, you could make a case (as I have) that the “Trip” films are kind of running out of tricks, that we’ve seen Coogan and Brydon do even their mightiest impersonations once too often, and that the wistful grace notes of all-the-world’s-a-stage melancholy that give the series its soul were there from the beginning, so there’s no real point in trying to “deepen” the material. It’s already about as deep as it’s going to get.

“The Trip to Greece,” however, falls way too short of being the grand finale this series deserves. You could say that they’re going out humbly, without fanfare (and without any risk of jumping the shark), and that that’s a good thing. It’s also trés British. But here’s why Coogan and Brydon should consider one more go-round, and here’s a suggestion of what, exactly, I think it should be.

“The Trip to Greece” wasn’t an ending, it was just a stop.

The new movie takes pains to have a dark undercurrent or two, especially after Coogan learns that his father has been taken ill. Yet even this sets up what is less a closing note than a kind of spiritual cliffhanger: What’s Coogan going to do when his vanity comes up against mortality? A great question, but it’s never answered.

For a series that is this fixated on American movie stardom, it needs to get out of its Euro comfort zone.

The “Trip” films are epicurean buddy-movie travelogues that might have been bankrolled by the European tourism industry. Each one, among other things, is a tossed-off advertisement for the glories of landscape, cuisine, history. The documentary shots of food being prepared in restaurant kitchens — we tend to see a dish tossed in a smoking pan just before it’s served to our heroes — are like privileged glimpses of ancient trade secrets. It’s all very luscious and Continental. So where would they go next — to France? Sweden? Germany? Ireland? No way. That formula really is spent. As a result, I think it’s finally time that Coogan and Brydon journeyed to the belly of the beast. The fifth and final “Trip” film should be….

“The Trip to California.” The two would start in the Pacific Northwest, drive down through San Francisco along the Pacific Coast Highway, and end up — of course — in Los Angeles, where they can finally confront the place that’s been the source of so many of their dreams.

They need to try out some radical new impressions.

In every “Trip” sequel, there are golden oldies — a touch of Pacino, a mumbled snippet of Tom Hardy — and at least one great new one, like the Dustin Hoffman-and-Laurence-Olivier-in-“Marathon-Man” set piece that’s the funniest sequence in “The Trip to Greece.” Yet as much as I adore these flashbacks to the ’70s, there’s a whole new world out there waiting to be mimicked into oblivion, and these are the guys to do it, even if Coogan now claims he couldn’t care less about being an impressionist. (Maybe so, but he’s so great at it that that’s just his version of every comedian wanting to play Hamlet.) The two could do Brad Pitt, John Travolta, Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, Quentin Tarantino…the sky of empathetic ridicule is the limit. “The Trip to California” should be the Coogan-and-Brydon celebrity roast to end all celebrity roasts.

They need face-to-face encounters with one or two of their prime targets.

This may sound like it edges into shark-jumping terrain, but how perfect would it be if, in the final “Trip” film, they actually ran into Michael Caine — and wound up conducting a three-way Caine dialogue with him? Or if they did the same thing with Pacino? The last “Trip” film should arrive at a delirious funhouse-mirror satirical high, leaving us with a sensation of deliverance. A scene like that would do that trick.

The film should be a light-handed meditation on comedy and acting.

We’ve heard enough, in bits and pieces, about Coogan and Brydon’s personal lives to kind of know who they are. But what is it that drives them, in their hidden hearts, as actor-comedians who emerged from a culture — England’s — where acting is part of the spiritual-behavioral lifeblood? In “The Trip to California,” their six-day trip should culminate in a joint appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” that’s as rivetingly funny and drop-dead revealing, in its way, as the talk-show climax of “Joker.” (They could meet Michael Caine there!) All of which is to say…

“The Trip to California” should be a heady celebration of showbiz.

Where, in Hollywood, does fantasy end and reality begin? And where is that line in these two men’s souls, as they play themselves in a series of movies where every moment is “real” and every moment is a performance? “The Trip to California” should end the series by going out with a big bang of meta hilarity. We, along with Coogan and Brydon, deserve nothing less.

More from Variety

Philanthropist Filip Filipi Looks to Return to Music With New Album ‘Gemini’s Die’

Can Today’s Tech Touchstones Solve Hollywood’s Loneliness Epidemic?

First Paramount, Now SiriusXM: Can Warren Buffett’s Media Investments Be Trusted?

More from our brands, rich homie quan, atlanta rap staple, dead at 33.

Bruno Mars Gifted Custom Royal Oaks to His Band and Manager. Now They’re Flipping Them.

NCAA House Settlement Not Approved, Faces Fire in Hearing

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Blue Bloods Boss Previews CBS Drama’s December Sendoff, Reveals How Iconic Series Finales Informed It

• Movies & TV
• Featured Categories

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-whole { font-size: 28px !important; } #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-fraction, #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-symbol { top: -0.75em; font-size: 13px; } $7.98 $ 7 . 98 FREE delivery Tuesday, September 10 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Atomic Chihuahua

Return this item for free.

We offer easy, convenient returns with at least one free return option: no shipping charges. All returns must comply with our returns policy.

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select your preferred free shipping option
• Drop off and leave!

Save with Used - Very Good #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-whole { font-size: 28px !important; } #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-fraction, #buybox .a-accordion .a-accordion-active .a-price[data-a-size=l].reinventPriceAccordionT2 .a-price-symbol { top: -0.75em; font-size: 13px; } $5.95 $ 5 . 95 FREE delivery Wednesday, September 11 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: California Book Bag

Image unavailable.

• Sorry, this item is not available in
• Image not available
• To view this video download Flash Player

• Prime Video $3.89 — $12.99
• Blu-ray —

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together.

Customers who bought this item also bought

Product Description

When Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People, Tropic Thunder) is asked by the Observer to tour the country's finest restaurants, he envisions it as the perfect getaway with his beautiful girlfriend. But, when she backs out on him, he has no one to accompany him but his best friend and source of eternal aggravation, Rob Brydon (A Cock and Bull Story). As the brilliant comic duo, free styling with flair, drive each other mad with constant competition and showdowns of competing impressions of famous celebrities, the ultimate odd couple realize in the end a rich amount about not only good food, but the nature of fame, relationships and their own lives.

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.6 x 5.3 x 7.5 inches; 0.8 ounces
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 22035699
• Director ‏ : ‎ Michael Winterbottom
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Multiple Formats, NTSC, Color, Widescreen
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 52 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ October 11, 2011
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Steve Coogan, Robert Brydon, Rob Brydon, Claire Keelan, Margo Stilley
• Producers ‏ : ‎ Melissa Parmenter, Andrew Eaton
• Studio ‏ : ‎ IFC Independent Film
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005E7SEM0
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #12,398 in Comedy (Movies & TV)

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 61% 16% 11% 6% 6% 61%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 61% 16% 11% 6% 6% 16%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 61% 16% 11% 6% 6% 11%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 61% 16% 11% 6% 6% 6%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 61% 16% 11% 6% 6% 6%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Every Ben Stiller Movie Performance, Ranked

Audiences have come to know and love many stiller personas: jester, auteur, control freak, buff daddy..

Over the course of 35 years, audiences around the world have come to love and despise many different Ben Stillers. Anyone who has seen a billboard since 1987 is sure to recognize Stupid Stiller, for example, the well-meaning lunkhead with a nasty clumsy streak but a winning warmth (“What is this? A center for ants?” ). There is also Bully Stiller, the neck-bulging megalomaniacal douchebag at the end of his rope; Panicked Stiller, the anxious worrywart with a stick perpetually up his ass ; and, of course, Broken Stiller, the friendless, beige sad sack marching invisibly through life . Each new iteration builds upon the last, creating a catalogue of distinct, but familiar, archetypes: Gen X’s answer to Woody Allen; a swole control freak with daddy issues; the auteur-obsessed cinephile with perfect hair. They are all, in their ways, touchstones of modern American comedy.

Then there is the “real” Ben Stiller, the actor-producer-writer-director-executive whose work on the silver screen has earned more than $3.3 billion in box-office receipts and positioned him among the Olympian elite of Hollywood megastars. The son of two revered comedians and both a husband and brother to fellow actors, the man is show business incarnate, an entertainer born into the limelight.

While his private life sometimes spills messily out into the tabloids, Stiller rarely ventures into the public eye except to fundraise for the Stiller Project , a nonprofit organization that “seeks to promote the well-being of children worldwide through initiatives that support education.” The few profiles to try and explore his inner self describe a Faustian figure, someone so singularly committed to being the audience’s fool that he has at times thwarted his own inclination toward “serious” roles. He is said to be desirous of the adoration and opportunities heaped on other actors of his generation and anxious to shed the jester hat he has worn in our collective consciousness for so long.

Stiller first gained notice on Broadway in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves in 1986, briefly joined Saturday Night Live in 1989, then emerged as a television star with his own acclaimed series in 1992. Two years later, he successfully pivoted to filmmaking with Reality Bites , then spent the rest of the ’90s using his burgeoning stardom to boost up-and-coming writer-directors: David O. Russell, Eric Schaeffer, Jake Kasdan, Donal Lardner Ward, Steve Brill, Neil LaBute.

After his role in 2000’s Meet the Parents cemented him as a major box-office draw, a corps of fellow hit-makers including Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black took shape, appearing in one another’s projects and dominating the cinematic landscape with irreverent, boyish humor. In this period, the persona that people know most intimately was formed: the tightwad Stiller whose dull little suburban life gets upended by an untameable wild card like Jennifer Aniston, Malin Akerman, or Jessica Alba, a figure whose overevolved sense of dread powers a well of self-hatred, entitlement, fury, and lust and who, despite irritable bowels and undiagnosed OCD, always manages to woo characters played by the likes of Cameron Diaz, Amy Adams, and Christine Taylor. In this mode, he is both jester and lover, loser and hero — the Hebrew Everyman bursting from the chrysalis of insecurity into something like adulthood.

Since 2010, however, Stiller’s star persona has taken a darker, more creatively diverse path, one that appears from the outside to align more with the real person’s true aspirations. Beginning with Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg and culminating most ostentatiously in the Emmy Award–winning Apple TV+ series Severance , which he executive produces and directs, he has in this time become Indie Spirit Award Nominee Stiller, Salt-and-Pepper Stiller, and Prestige Drama Director Stiller. Simultaneously, his face has virtually disappeared from movie screens, with the last film in which he starred released back in 2017.

Now, the 58-year-old multi-hyphenate is primed to redefine himself yet again: His first lead role in a feature in nearly a decade — David Gordon Green’s Nutcrackers — will have its world premiere tonight as the opening-night film of the Toronto International Film Festival, an event often considered the kickoff to awards season. And just as he begins campaigning for that overdue Oscar, season two of Severance is scheduled to launch in early 2025 after a painful three-year gap. With his reemergence impending, the time feels ripe to look back at the highest highs and lowest lows of his singular career in moving pictures.

Some caveats: As a matter of fairness, this ranking only accounts for the films in which Stiller gives fully fledged star performances. Projects in which he has minor supporting roles (think Stella , Empire of the Sun , and, more recently, Locked Down ) are therefore not mentioned, nor are those in which he appears in a cameo ( School for Scoundrels, Anchorman , Bros, etc.). It also excludes his extensive catalogue of television appearances, as well as the films he has produced or directed but does not appear in in any significant way.

While each of those projects deserves their own analysis too, it is by and large his cinematic performances that have shaped the world’s insatiable appetite for Movie-Star Stiller, and therefore it is only within that realm that this ranking operates. Which of his many films has stood the test of time? Which is better left forgotten? And which desperately needs to be considered anew? ( *Cough Envy Cough* ) . Read on, dear ones, and steel yourselves for validation and disappointment both, as we are certain to disagree on at least some things. Just remember: The truest Stiller will always be the one you picture when you close your eyes.

38. Little Fockers (2010)

Possibly Stiller’s most cynical cash grab (his payday was allegedly $20 million), Little Fockers offers barely more than reheated gags from the previous two Meet the Parents films, though this rendition is by far the most disturbing. Male nurse Gaylord — whose toxically masculine insecurities about his overbearing father-in-law, Jack (Robert De Niro), regularly lead him to bullshit his loving, loyal wife (Teri Polo) — is now a Chicago hotshot who sacrifices his integrity by hawking off-brand Viagra to charm a Big Pharma rep (Jessica Alba). In the closest thing to funny in the whole movie, Stiller stabs two-time Academy Award winner De Niro in the dick while his toddler son watches. Later, Alba’s character tosses some of her trashy pills back with wine and winds up assaulting Gaylord in his family home. Even while pulling these shock gags, Stiller and the rest of the cast, unfortunately including icons like Dustin Hoffman, Blythe Danner, and Barbra Streisand, spend 98 minutes on “pay-me-now” autopilot. No wonder Randy Newman couldn’t be bothered to do the score.

37. The Marc Pease Experience (2009)

Try as he might to bury it , Stiller’s part in this broken second feature from director Todd Louiso remains a visible stain on his track record. It’s not exactly Stiller’s fault, either. His Jon Gribble, the fascistic high-school drama teacher with a delusional a capella protegee (Jason Schwartzman at his most yippy), is the film’s only serviceable creation. In fact, it may be his most successfully repulsive role ever, given the sexual relationship between Gribble and one of his teenage students (for which, I might add dumbfoundedly, he remains karmically unpunished in one of many inexplicable loose ends). Rather, the great failure of this ceremoniously dumped Paramount Vantage picture is its coherence, or lack thereof. Judging by their performances, Stiller, Schwartzman, and Anna Kendrick (as the choir girl caught between a predatory 23-year-old and a predatory 43-year-old) appear to be in completely separate movies, none of which seems particularly worth watching.

36. Duplex (2003)

How and why Duplex went so wrong is one of Hollywood’s great mysteries. Directed by Danny DeVito with Drew Barrymore and Stiller as newly married Brooklynites and a script by Simpsons writer Larry Doyle, it should have been a sure thing. Yet everything about this pallid stunt comedy, from the increasingly gross setpieces (at one point, Barrymore’s Nancy pukes directly into her husband’s mouth) to the wasting of normally great character actors in minor roles (Harvey Fierstein! Maya Rudolph! Wallace Shawn!), screams “misfire.” As Alex Rose, the conflict-averse new owner of a stately duplex with a Machiavellian old tenant (Eileen Essell), Stiller plays one note for the entire film: annoyance. As expert as he is with that emotion, their battle grows tiresome quickly; by the time everything is said and done, we cheer when naughty Mrs. Connelly finally squashes both her obnoxious housemates — and the possibility of a sequel.

35-34. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) /Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)

Stiller embodies the “one for me, one for them” school of Hollywood careers, in which one lucrative studio flick pays for a more personal passion project. That philosophy at least gives us a modicum of insight into how these thankless, entirely redundant sequels got made. Whereas the first NATM got away with being straight-up dumb thanks to its just-don’t-think-too-much concept, Battle of the Smithsonian and Secret of the Tomb have considerably less novelty or innocence and therefore no clear reason to exist (and before you mention money, keep in mind that it isn’t illegal or even discouraged to make huge, profitable studio comedies that are also funny, interesting, and/or anti-racist). Larry Daley, the security guard Stiller plays across all three movies, was always supposed to be the straight man in a world of reanimated taxidermies, but it’s still a letdown to see him completely coast through the 100 stale callbacks that man-of-the-moment director Shawn Levy cobbles together into this weak one-two punch. Every joke is a replay from the original, from Larry’s psychotic fellow night guards (Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke in No. 1, Jonah Hill and Rebel Wilson in 2 and 3) to the dinosaur bones that act like little puppies to the interminable forced-perspective gags featuring Steve Coogan and Owen Wilson as homosocial model miniatures. Worse yet, Stiller looks genuinely miserable throughout both sequels, particularly in Secret of the Tomb , his famously lined cheeks pulled down unwittingly into a sour frown in nearly every shot. One wonders what kind of passion project was possibly worth facing off against Hank Azaria as a lisping Egyptian king complete with ancient headgear. Who cajoled him into bringing not one, but two slap-happy capuchins into the mix? Keep playing the same old hits, and you wind up starring in “Now That’s What I Call Cinema.”

33. Mystery Men (1999)

On a hillside overlooking beautiful Champion City, an animatronic skunk has sex with Paul Reubens. Take it or leave it, that’s the comedic level at which Kinka Usher’s tongue-in-cheek, anti-superhero film operates. There are parts of Usher’s bubble-gum dystopia that help Mystery Men still feel novel 22 years after release, like the villainous goons obsessed with disco, Tom Waits’s junkyard of nonlethal inventions, and Michael Bay playing a decent human being. Then there are moments like the skunk thing or Hank Azaria’s ( yet again poorly justified ) East Asian accent, which one imagines scored quite badly in most test screenings yet somehow made it into the finished film anyway. Stiller’s Roy, the leader of the titular supergroup, is rarely more than a wet blanket, literally powerless and mopey right until the climactic battle. Unlike in Stiller’s best roles, Roy’s relationship with a waitress played by Claire Forlani seems entirely forced. Watching it today, Mystery Men feels like the one that got away for Stiller, who was at his physical peak and should have been able to Paul Rudd his way into a fun-loving comic-book franchise with more ease. Perhaps predictably, Usher never directed another feature. But on the bright side, at least he got Dane Cook and Ricky Jay to star in a movie together.

32. Zoolander 2 (2016)

No character is more closely associated with our man than the dim-witted but really, really, ridiculously good-looking male model Derek Zoolander. This is for good reason: the first Zoolander, beloved by millennials and Terrence Malick alike, is a landmark in his career (and, spoiler alert, ranked much higher). But with such adoration comes added responsibility, a fact Stiller and his team should have considered more deeply before unleashing this undercooked, overplotted sequel on the world. Where the first film’s satire of over-the-top couture and Met Gala starfuckery was so on point, the second feels like a double dip with Stiller as the proverbially stale cracker. His co-stars, like Will Ferrell’s savage Mugatu, Owen Wilson’s stoner hottie Hansel, and Nathan Lee Graham’s servile Todd — all so precise and well-defined in the original’s ravelike milieu — are doomed to retrace their old steps here. Even the litany of topical cameos, a touchstone of the franchise, comes across as faintly desperate. Undeniably beautiful as the sight of Justin Bieber getting mowed down in cold blood is, the film just doesn’t work.

31. The Watch (2012)

I’m just going to say it: Ben Stiller is not built for sci-fi. I don’t mean physically (the dude is scientifically proven to be as jacked as Tom Cruise or any Hemsworth) so much as emotionally: Even at his most committed, he lacks the particular kind of brutal, masculine intensity needed to make screaming at a CGI-ed tennis ball feel real. It certainly doesn’t help to have aliens as ridiculous looking as those in Akiva Schaffer’s product-placement-choked follow-up to Hot Rod , nor to have the thinnest character arc in an already thin script. With all the laugh lines going to Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade, and Will Forte’s mustache, Stiller’s normally bankable stolidness becomes this disappointing film’s ball and chain. At one point, Vince Vaughn’s neighborhood-watch lieutenant even calls Stiller’s sterile Costco manager, Evan, a “control freak” — which is to say he’s no fun at all.

30. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)

Despite a disturbing opening sequence filled with weirdly bubbly mammalian asses swaying in unison, this slight sequel still contains a few unexpected pleasures: a mid– 30 Rock Alec Baldwin as a dastardly pompadoured lion; Sacha Baron Cohen’s mischievous King Julien’s constant abuse of Andy Richter’s Mort; this brain-melting crap . Stiller’s Alex the Lion, ostensibly the leader of the pack, takes a welcome back seat here, leaving the focus on the romance between David Schwimmer’s nervous giraffe, Melman, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s Gloria the Hippopotamus (show us their monstrous kids, Jeffrey Katzenberg!). As a result, M:E2A earns its stripes through an abundance of heart, even with some of the first film’s humor M.I.A. (those malevolent penguins, for example, are foolishly sidelined). That said, if I have to hear will.i.am’s five-minute cover of “I Like to Move It” ever again, I too will volunteer to sacrifice myself to the nearest volcano.

29. Meet the Fockers (2004)

Any fellow chosen people out there really feel it when Barbra Streisand yelled, “This is the fruit of your loins!”? For me, that’s the honest-to-goodness high point of this spottily funny redo, unless you count every time Jack Byrnes’s grandson says “asshole.” That is pretty good shit. Still, with Stiller and De Niro both in fine frenzied form and game appearances from Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as Greg’s loose-limbed parents, Meet the Fockers really should have kicked this blockbuster franchise up a notch. Instead, it cuts some unacceptable corners with regards to its characters of color and handily fails the Bechdel Test to boot. There is also more than a hint in this go-around that Greg’s constant lying to Pam is something more pathological than protective, yet Stiller and the ever-patient Teri Polo play this compulsion entirely for laughs. Sure, I laughed with them when I first saw it, but trust me: A post–Me Too rewatch hits different.

28. Night at the Museum (2006)

Watching Ben Stiller get slapped around by a little monkey tickles a primitive spot in the human brain. It’s debased, silly, violent caveman comedy ( literally ), and it works like a charm. Night at the Museum is purely a vector for gags like this, some of which will remain lodged in the cultural memory forever: an Easter Island head asking for chewing gum, for instance, or Larry being toppled, Gulliver-style, into a diorama. Yet none of screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon’s jokes are strong enough to mask the emotional emptiness on display in this, the kind of effects-heavy and content-lite movie parents worry might give their kids ADHD. Riddled with unnecessary scatology (weirdly, we’ve all seemingly forgotten that same capuchin actually pissing into Stiller’s mouth and eyes) and nasty pseudo-historical stereotypes , it’s a journey to nowhere for every character except Teddy Roosevelt, whom Robin Williams endows with just enough of his trademark sweetness. Even frequent Stiller collaborators like Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan fall short, rendered unfunny by a combination of weak material and poorly aged VFX. Where’s Noah Baumbach when you need him?

27. If Lucy Fell (1996)

Decked out like the unholy offspring of Adam Duritz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stiller somehow steals every scene in this otherwise insipid quirkfest. In true mid-’90s fashion, he plays a celebrity action painter called — if you can believe this — Bwick Elias (Bwick?!) whose intense, self-obsessed pretension is so great that he can barely sputter out his feelings for a pre– Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker. Big as the performance is, Stiller isn’t alone: Writer-director-star Eric Schaeffer also pillages shamelessly from the Sundance playbook of whimsy, giving himself the lion’s share of irony-laden pickup lines and depressive witticisms about the pointlessness of romance. Naturally, it’s Schaeffer’s staunchly independent painter who gets the girl, despite the fact that anyone with two eyes and a brain would be drawn to his far more charismatic (if inexplicably dreadlocked) rival.

26. The Heartbreak Kid (2007)

Stiller’s second film with the Farrelly Brothers is, for the most part, a miserable grotesquerie. Remade from the 1972 original directed by Elaine May (a masterpiece of dark comedy, ironically enough), it centers on Eddie (Stiller), a lovelorn San Franciscan pushed into a shotgun marriage with Lila (Malin Akerman) by the insecure combination of his own internalized sense of sexual entitlement and his team of goading, misogynistic yes-men. Eddie soon discovers that Lila is a “nightmare” — which is to say she eats, sleeps, fucks, and lives differently than him, therefore making her unworthy of his heteronormative social status and the reason he pursues an emotional affair with a more salt-of-the-earth woman (Michelle Monaghan, in the film’s sole redeeming role) on his Mexico honeymoon. Only in its final scene (in which Eddie, once he’s scorned by Monaghan’s Miranda, is revealed to have instantly taken a third wife, played by Eva Longoria) — do the Farrellys reveal their true message: that white men like Eddie are duplicitous scum who use their social capital to reinforce patriarchal power over women and manipulate them into domestic servility. Well, fair enough.

25. Keeping the Faith (2000)

A priest and a rabbi fall in love with a blonde … it certainly sounds like the setup for some broad rom-com, but in execution, Edward Norton’s directorial debut is far more contemplative than its premise — to its detriment. Working from a script by Oscar nominee Stuart Blumberg, Norton focuses on how two adorable best friends use pained humor to survive personal crises of faith, rather than on those crises themselves, as so many films about clergy tend to do. Nor are their jokes, for the most part, cheap. Both Stiller (as the rabbi) and Norton (as the priest) invest their deliveries with a certain shared cynicism, a lived familiarity, and, particularly in Stiller’s case, a garnishing of his standard sexual desperation. So why are neither funny? It comes as no shock that the two never worked together again. There is also, it must be said, something thankless in Jenna Elfman’s role as the apple of both men’s eyes. Since it is never in doubt whose arms she’ll fall into (one of the two isn’t allowed to have sex, so you do the math), the love triangle powering Blumberg’s drama lacks all tension. What’s left are three cautious, easygoing performances in a film with no drive — competent, for sure, but ultimately a bit ponderous.

24. Black & White (1999)

Come, let us journey to the year 1999, when white women wore cornrows with impunity, gangsta rap was still fighting to be taken seriously in the music industry, and James Toback could still get a new feature greenlit. Black & White is a solid time capsule of this confusing era and more, a multi-narrative thriller in the hyperlink-cinema tradition with a massive star-filled cast. You’ve got Robert Downey Jr. as a barely closeted documentarian, for example, as well as Brooke Shields as his Dolezal-like beard, Elijah Wood as a teenager desperately trying to fit in with Black people, and Ben Stiller as a philosophy-spouting cop using racist methods to clear his filthy record. Toback’s script is as ambitious as ever, weaving together threads around miscegenation, queerness, class-based violence, cultural gatekeeping, and nonfiction cinema with far more intensity and idiosyncrasy than, say, Crash or Green Book . Most of the cast rises to meet the quality of his inimitable patter, particularly in the cases of Stiller, Claudia Schiffer, and Joe Pantoliano, upon whose backs the core mystery hinges. It might still work as entertainment 21 years later if not for the fact that friends of Toback’s like Mike Tyson and Brett Ratner also make distractingly prominent appearances.

23. Zero Effect (1998)

Screenwriting scion Jake Kasdan’s first film is difficult to find now, a largely forgotten blip in both his career and that of his two leads, Bill Pullman and Ben Stiller. That’s a shame, because they make quite a fine Holmes and Watson, respectively, to Kasdan’s Conan Doyle. Zero Effect appears at first glance to be a classic Sherlock rip-off, complete with a hyperintuitive, drug-addled detective, his anal-retentive assistant, and a dangerously appealing femme fatale. But like his characters, Kasdan is too clever for his own good, turning what begins as an otherwise derivative murder mystery into a lean parable on class and the American health-care system in its third act. Within that context, Stiller is quite an effective second fiddle, all the more so when you consider that this gripping, cynical drama came out the same year as There’s Something About Mary . Watch them together and the range between his performances becomes something to behold.

22. Tower Heist (2011)

It is unfortunate that Stiller’s rock-solid work in this class-conscious crime caper got overshadowed in release by its director. The film is anchored by Stiller’s Josh Kovaks, who manages the struggling employees of a Trump-style tower and acts as a friend to all of them when the pissant billionaire owner (Alan Alda) goes full Madoff (his working victims are played by a litany of world-class character actors: Michael Peña, Gabourey Sidibe, Stephen McKinley-Henderson, Nina Arianda). Unusually for Stiller, however, Kovaks is also almost entirely ticless: neither neurotic nor anxious, overconfident or abrasive, he’s just an ethical, normal person. Other big name co-stars, including Eddie Murphy as Kovaks’s criminal compadre and Matthew Broderick (in his finest performance since Election ), get the laughs, but it’s Stiller’s, er, towering performance as a man whose most distinctive quality is being a big sweetie that steals the film.

21. Starsky & Hutch (2004)

Like every Todd Phillips movie, this light-hearted reboot of the classic 1970s buddy-cop show is about twice as good as it needs to be. That is almost entirely thanks to the time-tested chemistry between Stiller and Owen Wilson, each perfectly typecast as the resident sexy neurotic and his sexy airheaded partner. Look, it’s no Joker , but Phillips gets the job of making you laugh done with the same douchey, casually chauvinistic confidence he brought to fratsterpieces like Old School and The Hangover. Come for the anxious-but-effective cop and his smarter-than-he-seems partner going toe-to-toe with a mustachioed Vince Vaughn, stay for the Dan Band serenading a 13-year-old’s bat mitzvah with a nasty cover of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love.”

20. Reality Bites (1994)

Helen Childress, the writer of Reality Bites , has said that its title refers to small chunks of real life rather than the experience of living through the dumpster fire of George H.W. Bush-era America. If that’s true, then Ben Stiller, who chose the feature as his directorial debut, definitely did not understand the assignment, given that the finished film is about four cynical burnouts struggling to pay rent while making lo-fi Soderberghian documentaries. Regardless, Gen-X nostalgists and their offspring have long since anointed it an era-defining cinematic Bible of the early 1990s in the legacy of Slacker and Singles , and it remains among Stiller’s most treasured movies. Reality Bites also demonstrated his aptitude at directing himself in starring roles: His performance as the principle-free, tie-wearing exec fighting with his polar opposite, the rock musician and poetry-spouting asshole Troy (Ethan Hawke), over Winona Ryder’s Lelaina Pierce expertly straddles the line between appealing and appalling. In fact, all but one of the projects Stiller both directed and starred in show up later on this list.

19. Along Came Polly (2004)

Yes, this film only truly “works” when our lord and GOAT Philip Seymour Hoffman is onscreen. But there would be no grease-drinking, Judas-playing Sandy without his anal-retentive best friend, Reuben Feffer. As the pathologically risk-averse soyboy trying to woo Jennifer Aniston’s Polly Prince, Stiller amps Feffer’s mania up to 11: Any time he sweats, pukes, squirms, dances, or has diarrhea because of Polly, he does so with anguished gusto. Unfortunately, his is a multi-octave performance stuck in a primarily one-note movie that also features what must be Hank Azaria’s worst accent ever (well, maybe second worst ). He and Aniston (fun but underused here as a brainless dolt) are due for a rematch. Let it rain!

18. Meet the Parents (2000)

In some ways, this is Stiller’s ur-blockbuster, a marvel of Rube Goldbergian steam-building with hundreds of potty-mouthed jokes undergirding it all. So many of the set pieces are inspired, so many quotes are iconic (“I have nipples, Greg …”), and De Niro gives his funniest performance of all time, so much so that his aptitude as a comedian has never been questioned since. The movie’s not without problems, of course: There was never anything inherently funny about the name “Gaylord,” for instance, or male nurses, and that is especially true in 2024. Still, watch how quietly Stiller transitions Greg Focker from put-upon beta to the spastic, sputtering alpha he’s become world-famous for playing. All things considered, we’re talking about a bona fide classic here.

17. While We’re Young (2014)

It’s fortunate for everyone that the second of Stiller’s starring roles in a Noah Baumbach film also coincided with the second collaboration between the acclaimed writer-director and Adam Driver because they level each other beautifully, with Driver bringing out the rageful undercurrent of Stiller’s tried-and-true depressed-dad persona and Stiller, in kind, enabling the inherent goofiness in the younger man’s intimidating physicality. Their scenes together as self-obsessed mentor and devious mentee are snakey and silly and tragic all in one; actually, Stiller finds choice moments with all of his scene partners, particularly Maria Dizzia and Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz as his upsettingly comfortable New York buddies as well as Charles Grodin (Hollywood’s proto-Stiller) as the Pennebaker-esque documentarian that Stiller’s Josh Srebnick wishes he was. Less suffocating than Greenberg yet more optimistic than The Meyerowitz Stories , WWY remains the frothiest and arguably most outright fun of Baumbach and Stiller’s work together (unless you consider the below …).

16. Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (2012)

Martin Short as a crazed Italian circus sea lion! Frances McDormand as an Edith Piaf–singing animal murderess! The Penguins “Baba Booeying” one another! Who could have predicted that the third (and potentially final ) chapter of this massive children’s franchise would wind up being the most balls-to-the-wall animated film of the 2010s? The evidence suggests that Stiller and series directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath (with assists from Shrek 2 director Conrad Vernon and Stiller whisperer Noah Baumbach) must have felt boxed in by the required formulae of the previous movies or else vengeful against their overlords at Dreamworks. Their revenge? This wild acid trip — for kids! Alex mating with an Italian trapeze jaguar is only the tip of the weird-joke iceberg.

15. Envy (2004)

Stupidly mismarketed and resultantly misunderstood in its time, Barry Levinson’s idiosyncratic and still crackingly funny Envy features the first and only true Stiller–Jack Black two-hander. Frankly, that sucks, because as former best friends Tim Dingman and Nick Vanderpark, they are inarguably terrific together. Dingman is all hollowed-out resentment at Vanderpark’s oblivious, insufferable kindness; they are oil and water in the best way, both performers totally in equal-but-opposite flows as Vanderpark’s Va-Poo-Rize fortune sends Dingman into a dangerous, bumbling rage. Levinson’s twisty, almost noir tone (Dutch angles and murderous drifters abound) makes the litany of sight gags on display twice as funny. Sure, we expect the bum (Christopher Walken at his Walkeniest) who helps Dingman plan his best friend’s murder to double cross him, but not to get an arrow shot into his shoulder. Vanderpark is an unusually rich part for Black, too, one of his more wide-eyed, mellow performances in the Bernie vein. But it’s Stiller’s self-righteous jealousy — never more potent a tool in his kit — that tethers their relationship to something genuinely painful.

14. Heavyweights (1995)

What is it about this Steven Brill comedy that so resonates with children of the 1990s? It’s not particularly great as, like, cinema . Nor is its message especially body-positive or life-affirming in any way (if you remember it as a loving ode to fat kids, try watching it again). But Stiller’s Tony Perkis — one of a few beefcake villains in his oeuvre — pushes every scene to an extreme with manic, malevolent focus. Sporting Richard Lewis hair above a Tony Robbins smile, Perkis is part tyrannical camp counselor, part abusive daddy, and, to this day, one of Stiller’s most committed, outrageous character roles. The performance is so vibrant that those who found the film on a late-night Disney Channel rerun are still hard pressed to forget him licking the ground mid-pushup more than 25 years later (take it from me). Given that Stiller himself is notoriously particular about his characters’ looks, there’s also a worthwhile thesis to be written on Perkis’s psychotic behavior as a mirror for Hollywood’s expectations of its stars. Film students, get those dissertations ready …

13. Your Friends and Neighbors (1998)

If you ever want to watch Ben Stiller fully cuck Aaron Eckhart, here is your one and only opportunity. Together, they are two of the devilish six-part choir assembled in Neil LaBute’s symphony of domestic hostility. Reviews of the film at the time tended to single out the career-best performance of Jason Patric, primarily because, as the aggro, rape-minded workout buddy to Eckhart’s weak-spined Barry, Patric’s is the showiest and most sickening role. Don’t ignore Stiller, though: With his coiffed little goatee and professorial wire-rims, his Jerry is every bit the predatory equal of Patric’s Cary, especially when it comes to his female acting students. In a movie about trash people hurting one another because of horny, Jerry is arguably the cruelest, wrapping his manipulative, coercive behavior inside the guise of artistic malaise and sensitivity. Stiller digs deep into and implodes the archetype of the Nice Jewish Boy with such palpable pleasure that his scenes almost feel fun, at least compared to the arch misery with which LaBute so skillfully colors the rest of the movie.

12. Permanent Midnight (1998)

“Based on an allegedly true story of TV writer Jerry Stahl with a $5,000 a week job and a $6,000 a week habit.” This somewhat glamorous tagline from the Permanent Midnight marketing campaign does the film adaptation of Stahl’s same-named autobiography no favors, disguising as it does the brutal self-abasement brought out in Stiller’s bravura performance as Stahl. His is the kind of role critics normally call “raw” or “transformative”: a completely embodied, often stomach-turning portrait of eyes-rolled-into-the-forehead, veins-popping-from-the-neck addiction. In a more just world, Stiller would have been an immediate contender for an Academy Award, or at least one of those conciliatory Golden Globes given to comedians brave enough to break into drama. Perhaps the confusion comes from director David Veloz’s attempts to have it both ways tonally, presenting Stahl in the throes of heroin withdrawal in one scene then goofing off with Andy Dick on Maury in the next. Between some shots, we barely have enough time to stop crying before we are asked to giggle. Even so, what should have been Stiller’s The Truman Show wound up more like his The Majestic : a lost opportunity to bring overdue prestige to a star it has long eluded.

11. The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)

The message of Noah Baumbach’s tenth feature? Be careful what you wish for. After two-plus decades of the public’s begging for a comedy team-up, Baumbach finally managed to bring Ben Stiller and his exact doppelgänger , Adam Sandler, together in a talky, dreary drama about childhood sexual trauma and the inevitability of dying a failure. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a brilliantly funny film, evocative in its forlorn and stately misery of Bergman’s family dramas with a few pinches of Annie Baker’s soft humanism in the mix. But it’s also a shock to see America’s most lovable Jews throw hands on the Bard quad. That Stiller, Baumbach’s favorite muse under six-foot-two , is relegated to the quiet role in an ensemble of renowned stage and screen actors is no accident; no one writes to Stiller’s soft side with more moral generosity than Baumbach. As the last remaining bastion of sanity, patience, and responsibility in the self-sabotaging Meyerowitz clan, Stiller is heartbreakingly real. Rumor spread some years back that Stiller and Sandler were due back together soon in an upcoming film. On the basis of this, consider us stoked.

10. Madagascar (2005)

For a brief moment in 2005, there was simply no escaping “I Like to Move It.” Fans of a pre- Borat Sacha Baron Cohen, who sang the ragga earworm as the lemur King Julien, were probably pleased; parents of young children must have been miserable. Either way, thanks in no small part to its ubiquity, Madagascar made $555 million at the box office and kickstarted a massive new franchise for Dreamworks. Unencumbered by the neurosis or abject horniness of his standard live-action roles, Stiller is gently fraternal as the voice of Alex the Lion, the franchise’s core mammal and group leader. Co-stars like Baron Cohen, Chris Rock, and David Schwimmer get most of the good laugh lines, but Stiller is the beating heart of this first film, carrying Alex out of the insufferable vanity he inherited as a star at the Central Park Zoo to a place of self-acceptance in the wild like a leonine Siddhartha. It’s genuinely touching.

9. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

The film that Stiller the director was always meant to make. Perhaps unsurprisingly, audiences struggled with Walter Mitty. While its first trailers suggested a potential awards power player, reviews were ultimately middling, in part because it pivoted on one of the most charming men in cinema being made to appear completely charmless — and succeeded too well. Stiller is at his most fragile ever onscreen as an internalized shell of a man with a gray aura and an almost suicidal loneliness. To see him as James Thurber’s nowhere man is to weep for him, until, predictably, he beats his bully (his neckbeardy future Severance star, Adam Scott) and gets the girl (Kristen Wiig). Look deeper than the “khaki-loving sad sack self-actualizes by skateboarding on a volcano” plot, though, and a more nuanced narrative appears: that of a Hollywood comedy director finally emerging from the purgatory of broad-strokes franchise filmmaking into the most visually and tonally mature work of his career.

8. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)

Six words for you: “Dodge, duck, dip, dive, and … dodge.” If that doesn’t make you giggle, then you have a heart made of stone. No one would call it subtle, but Rawson Marshall Thurber’s dumbass sports comedy has aged like gas-station wine, which is to say it’s as funny as ever and gets you rightly fucked up. Most of the laughs are of the uncontrollable variety, triggered by the sight either of Stiller’s napoleonic White Goodman spitting bile at Vince Vaughn’s hapless rival and straight man, Peter La Fleur, or of some strangely dressed Europeans getting pelted in that most amusing of body parts. There are also fart jokes, piss-drinking, illiterate hobo pirates, and Missi Pyle with a unibrow and fangs, all of which still go straight to the comedy jugular 20 years after the film’s release. It’s as close as Stiller ever got to making Jackass , and it’s long past time we got a sequel.

7. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

One wonders why Wes Anderson’s ever-expanding retinue of regulars never again included Stiller after this first everlastingly delicious collaboration. He is just magnificent, all grief and wound and shatter, as Chas Tenenbaum, the least measurably accomplished of Royal and Etheline Tenenbaum’s children. It is beyond hack at this point to call an Anderson film impeccable, or to say that the worlds created in his work reflect a control of image, design, and sound so precise as to seem almost arid. Yet Chas and his squirrelly fury disrupt Anderson’s normal diorama. Against the droll sadness brought to the table by Luke Wilson, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Bill Murray’s performances, Chas lights up with a ferocious volatility that feels directly leached or learned from Gene Hackman’s Royal. Because he stands out so vividly, many of the film’s most iconic visual motifs belong to Chas: the track suits, the perm, the spotted mice. Perhaps this is why Anderson has yet to work with Stiller again: He shines too brightly in work that normally reflects its director’s authorship. Or maybe I’m just reading into it and the right reconnection simply hasn’t revealed itself. Either way, I hesitate to get too greedy. We are already so lucky just to have this jewel.

6. There’s Something About Mary (1998)

It’s easy to remember the splooge in Cameron Diaz’s hair or the fish hook in the mouth. What often gets forgotten when we talk about There’s Something About Mary is the rubbery physicality that Stiller brings to his role as Ted, the brace-faced loser whose eventual glow-up lands him a date with the girl of his dreams. Under the Farrelly Brothers’ direction, Stiller is at his most frantic, nasty, combustible, and debased; he is, in short, comedy incarnate. Add to that his chemistry with Diaz, a performer every bit as game as he is for the Farrellys’ signature puerility (and long overdue herself for a truly challenging role), and you get an unimpeachable classic with two electrically funny movie stars at the top of their game. You’ll never look at a zipper the same way again.

5. Zoolander (2001)

The last 20 years have been very kind to Stiller’s magnum opus. Gaudy, sweaty, and drenched in glitter, Zoolander was as high-concept as Hollywood comedies got in its era, a Pop Art–inflected karate thriller with a Nyquil-drunk fever-dream rhythm and the dialogue of an early Apatow stoner buddy flick. Its bombastic send-up of the fashion world was rivetingly, colorfully surreal, and it is the rare comedy that meme culture has only made better . In a way, demonic performances like Will Ferrell’s as the fashion assassin Jacobim Mugatu or Justin Theroux as a bug-eyed DJ were just a series of timeless GIFs stapled together in the edit. Even so, this is undeniably Stiller’s film. On top of the fact that he co-wrote, produced, and directed it, Derek Z. remains his (and Drake Sather’s) signature creation, the all-time stupidest of the Stupid Stillers as well as the most organically quotable. Not enough is said about Stiller’s dexterity as a director, either: After the pseudo-documentary vibes of Reality Bites and the Farrelly-tinted black farce of The Cable Guy , Zoolander , his third feature, cemented his credentials as a genre-hopping journeyman director in the vein of Sidney Lumet, Jonathan Demme, or John Frankenheimer (whose The Manchurian Candidate serves as one of the film’s key points of inspiration). It careens wildly between action and satire, soft-core porn and underwear advertisement, without ever losing its sparkling sense of inherent silliness. As a result, the movie has grown into its reputation as one of the great cinematic tentpoles of the early millennium, and, for better or worse, is probably the only movie guaranteed to appear in every Ben Stiller career retrospective once he retires. That’s something that even Zoolander 2 can never destroy.

4. Brad’s Status (2017)

A few years before he masterminded the global phenomenon that was The White Lotus , creator Mike White spearheaded this searching and criminally underrated indie two-hander about a father and son touring prospective colleges. Stiller, going full silver fox, displays heretofore unseen shades of melancholy as Brad Sloan, a medium-successful married man whose banal accomplishments as a nonprofit worker start to seem like failures. As his boy Troy, who wants nothing less than to reminisce about or meet Dad’s more successful college friends, Austin Abrams is every bit Stiller’s equal. Troy’s deceptive sullenness masks a profound understanding of Brad’s crisis, and their argument scenes, which White inserts almost as chapter breaks between colleges, are wrenching as the realities of Brad’s pain and Troy’s profound understanding of it collide. Those scenes alone make this exquisite drama from one of the best writer-directors in the game worth every minute.

3. Greenberg (2010)

Leave it to Noah Baumbach, that poet of upper-middle-class pain, to fully unearth the latent dread that powers Stiller’s star persona. Given its appearance at the end of a decade-long run of blockbuster comedies, Greenberg is most easily compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love with Adam Sandler, though only inasmuch as both films allowed their stars to shuffle off the handcuffs of farce and commit to something more sincere. Greenberg , however, is hardly the arthouse film that PTA’s is, borrowing more from the then-popular mumblecore school instead, including by featuring that movement’s greatest star, Greta Gerwig, as Roger Greenberg’s hook-up buddy (Mark Duplass, another mumblecore pioneer, appears as one of Greenberg’s bandmates). As Greenberg, a carpenter on the back end of a nervous breakdown, Stiller lets his normally muscular shoulders slump forward and his eyes refuse to light up with their famous blueness. It is a sad, perfect performance made all the better by being exactly the kind of thing Tugg Speedman could only dream of starring in.

2. Tropic Thunder (2008)

Who left the fridge open? Tugg Speedman, the action star at the center of Damien Cockburn’s (Steve Coogan) titular Vietnam epic, is Stiller’s greatest idiot, a roided-out narcissist with a photogenic face and a penchant for making trashy Hollywood product despite his best efforts. Stiller and his co-writers Etan Cohen and Justin Theroux’s genius is to surround Speedman with even dumber dipshits: his drug-addled sellout co-star, Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black); the overcommitted Australian Method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.); and a dozen other red-blooded maniacs sweating it out in the jungle. Again serving as director and producer in addition to writing and starring, Stiller succeeds in making his cleverest and most savage satire — yet, oddly, it contains his most underrespected role. That he did not receive an Academy Award nomination while RDJ did is still stupefying. Simple Jack forever.

1. Flirting with Disaster (1996)

In Flirting with Disaster , we reach three apotheoses in one: that of Stiller’s peerless portrayal of the harried, sexually hysterical Jewish husband; his lifelong obsession with working with American auteurs; and David O. Russell’s early career as one such filmmaker. Their collision point results in one of the funniest screwball comedies of the modern era, a pervert’s homage to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World brought to life by a cast of legends: Mary Tyler Moore, Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, George Segal, Richard Jenkins, Josh Brolin, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni. That Stiller stands out amid this crowd as a jumpy little man looking to kick his stalled married life back into high gear by finding his biological parents is a testament both to his gifts as the world’s most frantic clown and to Russell’s generous, madcap labyrinth of a script. To watch Stiller leap maniacally at Leoni (the first time to “wrestle” her, the second to woo her) is to see the ’90s-buff answer to Charlie Chaplin come into his one-of-a-kind comedy timing for the very first time. In a lifetime of mighty physical performances, Stiller has never been more limber, more appealing, or more expressive than he is here. Hell, even Chaplin needed a cane to get his point across.

• vulture homepage lede
• ben stiller
• vulture lists
• vulture picks
• night at the museum
• meet the parents
• the royal tenenbaums

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 163: September 5, 2024
• The Bachelorette Season-Finale Recap: It Wasn’t Supposed to Be This Way
• The Perfect Couple Series-Premiere Recap: Welcome to Summerland
• Joker: Folie à Deux Commits the Mortal Sin of Wasting Lady Gaga
• The Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras Recap: Tuesdays With C.T.
• Slow Horses Season-Premiere Recap: Identifying Marks

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Trip to Italy

Two men, six meals in six different places on a road trip around Italy. Liguria, Tuscany, Rome, Amalfi and ending in Capri. Two men, six meals in six different places on a road trip around Italy. Liguria, Tuscany, Rome, Amalfi and ending in Capri. Two men, six meals in six different places on a road trip around Italy. Liguria, Tuscany, Rome, Amalfi and ending in Capri.

• Michael Winterbottom
• Steve Coogan
• Rosie Fellner
• 92 User reviews
• 104 Critic reviews
• 75 Metascore
• 1 nomination

Top cast 15

• (as Timothy Leach)

• La Suvera Receptionist
• Villa Cimbrone Receptionist
• Villa Cimbrone Porter

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Like the previous film, The Trip (2010) , Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan improvised their scenes together.
• Goofs Toward the end of the movie (33 minute to the end), they are showing and commenting about a fruit they call "kumquat" which is in fact a "Physalis" also called "Cape Gooseberry", a fruit originally from Chile and Peru. A Kumquat is like a miniature orange, which can be eaten whole, or used in making marmalade. It has a very sharp flavour. A physalis has a paper-like husk like a tomatillo and is very sweet when ripe.

Steve : [In reference to Alanis Morissette] You know I can see the appeal in a woman like this. Volatile women are always sexy when you first meet them but two years down the line you're sorta saying things like, 'can you just put the lids back on eh... on these jars please.'

• Connections Edited from The Trip (2010)
• Soundtracks All I Really Want Written by Glen Ballard and Alanis Morissette Published by Bucks Music Group Limited on behalf of Penny Farthing Music; Universal/MCA Music Limited Performed by Alanis Morissette Licensed courtesy of Warner Music UK Ltd.

User reviews 92

• JohnDeSando
• Sep 16, 2014
• How long is The Trip to Italy? Powered by Alexa
• April 25, 2014 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• IFC Films (United States)
• Official Facebook
• Villa Cimbrone, Ravello, Italy (Terrazzo dell'lnfinito)
• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• Revolution Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Aug 17, 2014

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 48 minutes

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

'Joker 3' Gets an Ominous Update From Todd Phillips: "The Story Is Told"

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Now that we're finally gearing up to watch Joker: Folie à Deux in theaters, it's inevitable to start wondering about the future of the massively popular film series and where Arthur Fleck ( Joaquin Phoenix ) could go next. According to director and screenwriter Todd Phillips , though, the Batman villain might not make it very far. The filmmaker spoke to Collider and other outlets during a Q&A following an early screening and talked briefly about whether we'll get a third Joker movie.

During the Q&A, Phillips stressed that the reason why the sequel exists is that he and lead star Phoenix felt they had a really strong follow-up to 2019's Joker , and that once again they're attempting to push the boundaries of the characters in ways that keep surprising audiences. When they were done filming Joker , both Phillips and Phoenix felt they could keep going for much longer, but this time around the director suggested that might not be the case. He said:

"The last day on this one was very different because we were in New York shooting on the stairs with 8,000 paparazzi people. It was a very frustrating day, so we all wanted to get the hell out of there. But we then had this little get-together downtown at my friend's bar, and it was actually really beautiful. Joaquin and Gaga and everybody was there, and, of course, the crew. Again, you'll see the movie, and you'll go, 'Oh, I get it. The story is told.'"

What Is 'Joker: Folie à Deux' About?

Considering that Arthur Fleck's story is pretty tragic and that in Joker: Folie à Deux he'll be dealing with the consequences of his actions in the first movie, which will see him cross paths with Gaga's Harley Quinn. In any case, we'll have to wait until October to start speculating more about where we leave Arthur Fleck and what it means for the franchise.

In Joker: Folie à Deux , we'll find out more about Arthur's shocking decision to commit a crime on live television and how it echoed across the country. He ends up inspiring Harley Quinn ( Lady Gaga ), a music therapist who falls in love with Arthur and starts going on delusional adventures with the former clown. The cast also features Zazie Beetz ( Deadpool 2 ), Ken Leung ( Avatar: The Last Airbender ), Catherine Keener ( The Adam Project ), Steve Coogan ( The Trip ), and Brendan Gleeson ( The Banshees of Inisherin ).

Joker: Folie à Deux premieres in theaters on October 4. You can check out the trailer below:

Joker: Folie a Deux

Joker: Folie a Deux continues the story of Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he navigates life after being institutionalized at Arkham State Hospital. Lady Gaga joins the cast as Harley Quinn, a music therapist who becomes romantically involved with Arthur. The film explores their chaotic relationship and is set in a unique musical format.

Get Tickets

• Todd Phillips