Director: Noah Baumbach; Starring: Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Grace Van Patten, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson, Candice Bergman, Rebecca Miller. 15 cert, 112 mins

Imagine digging around in the garden shed for the first time in years and finding a Picasso propped up against the wallpaper steamer. Watching Adam Sandler in The Meyerowitz Stories is a little like that.

The star of Pixels and Grown Ups – and, to be fair, also Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People – has been bad in so many awful films that when he’s terrific in a great one, it feels like both a revelation and a windfall: you can’t quite wrap your head around the fact all that talent has just been lying there all along, gathering cobwebs and dust.

Noah Baumbach’s new film, which arrives on Netflix today after a jaunt around the film festivals, gives Sandler his best role in an absolute age, but it’s merely one of many pleasures in this comedy about three generations of a semi-bohemian New York Jewish family wriggling through a knot of crises.

Like Baumbach’s earlier work, it’s all sharp angles and prickly surfaces, but there’s real warmth and bittersweetness here too, along with a family tree that recalls Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums: one imperfect patriarch and three diversely damaged adult kids, one of whom is played by Ben Stiller.