PLOT: Bart Millard, lead singer of MercyMe, faces a personal crisis at the peak of his success. As his world unravels, he struggles with his beliefs and inner demons while seeking a path through adversity.

REVIEW: I should state right off the bat that I’m far from the faith based target audience for I Can Only Imagine 2, but I am aware of the band MercyMe. In fact, back in my middle school days, I saw the band perform live. So I do feel like I have some kind of experience with this music, even if it’s not my bag these days.

I Can Only Imagine 2 follows Bart Millard as he tries to lead his band MercyMe after their initial happy ending, but has issues at home that make him depressed. There is an interesting story there about what happens after you find big success, and where do you go from there now that you’ve tackled the mountain? But it’s more focused on Bart feeling like he’s failed as a father (which he states while providing for his big family, in his big house). Broadway star John Michael Finley does a good job as Bart, though it feels like his drama is just there for the sake of it. Milo Ventimiglia gives a good performance as Tim Timmons, a core member of the bad, even if the character himself is more annoying than anything. Dennis Quaid mostly shows up in archive footage, though he does get a quite meaningful flashback at one point.

The first film is about how Bart grew up and the creation of his Christian hit song, from which the film’s title is based. This sequel tries to show what it’s like for a musician to move forward after initial success and the struggles that may come with it, but it feels lost in its messaging. The lesson appears to be that you just need to create another hit song that catches on and brings massive success. So it’s kind of just hitting the same beats, but rather than starting from the bottom, we’re following them on a headlining tour. It’s hard to really feel like the band or the characters are really struggling in any significant way.

There’s so much manufactured drama here, and much of it feels unnecessary. One of the main conflicts of the entire movie is that Bart’s son Sam has Type 1 Diabetes. He has a lot of guilt regarding the fact that he has to hurt his kid by sticking him with a needle, and it reminds him of the abuse he endured by his father. You’d think this would be a slight subplot, but it extends the entire runtime and gets resolved in a montage. Sam gets mad at his father because he can’t take responsibility for his own health and remember to take his insulin. It comes across so childish, and even winding up in the hospital doesn’t teach him that he needs to remember to actually keep after his blood sugar levels. Instead, he’s just rewarded with a spot on the tour due to Bart’s guilt, versus Sam actually showing some initiative.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is packed full of random subplots yet none of them ever seen to really matter. It feels like the writer is just throwing a dart at a board covered with as many dramatic tropes as you can think of. Cancer? Check. Random pregnancy? Check. Son being mad at his father? You better believe that’s a check. I know that this is based on a true story but it’s all presented in such a rapid fire way that none of it even feels real. The ending text summary of what happened to everyone is real life just further adds to the feeling of “What was even the point of this film?”

However, it must be said that the music is well done and it was nice to see Red Rocks Amphitheater get such a spotlight as it is one of the greatest places to see a concert on the planet. But the messaging feels a bit lost and the focus is in the wrong spots. There are multiple times where characters are preaching to the viewer and it all feels very on the nose. I’m sure fans of MercyMe will enjoy seeing this but I’m really not sure the story transcends the faith-based audience for those without prior investment in the band. However, the target audience will no doubt appreciate it.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is now playing in theaters.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter

Get the latest movie and TV news, first looks, reviews, and interviews, straight from the JoBlo crew to your inbox.

Advertisement

Hours before filmmaking legend Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were found stabbed to death in their Brentwood home, they attended a holiday party at Conan O’Brien’s house.

Now, two months after the tragedy, the comedian has broken his silence about the death of his good friends.

“To have that experience of saying good night to somebody and having them leave and then find out the next day that they’re gone … I think I was in shock for quite a while afterward,” O’Brien said in an interview for “The New Yorker Radio Hour” podcast. “I mean, there’s no other word for it. It’s just very — it’s so awful. It’s just so awful.”

As host of the Dec. 13 party, O’Brien was among the last people to see the Reiners alive. Their 32-year-old son, Nick, was arrested the following night and charged with murdering his parents. Two sources who attended the party described witnessing a loud verbal exchange between Nick Reiner and his parents.

In an interview published Friday, O’Brien said he and his wife were very close with the couple, describing them as “just such lovely people.”

O’Brien praised Rob Reiner’s talent as a director and his tireless advocacy efforts. The “When Harry Met Sally …” director was a prominent Democratic donor, noted critic of President Trump and a champion for causes such as early childhood education and gay marriage.

“I think about how Rob felt about things that are happening in the country, how involved he was, how much he put himself out there — and to have that voice go quiet in an instant is still hard for me to comprehend,” O’Brien told The New Yorker.

O’Brien said he considers Reiner “one of the greats” given his impressive track record of directing a series of blockbuster movies.

“To make seven — in, like, a nine-year, 10-year, 11-year period — is insanity,” O’Brien said. “With ‘Spinal Tap’ alone, if that’d been the only thing he ever did, he influenced my generation enormously.”

O’Brien fondly recalled first watching the rock mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap” in college, calling it a “splitting-the-atom moment.”

The pair were not only friends, but also collaborators. Reiner was a guest on a 1999 episode of “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and also appeared on episodes of O’Brien’s podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” in 2023 and 2025.

Authorities allege Nick Reiner fatally stabbed his 78-year-old father and 70-year-old mother at their Brentwood home sometime in the early morning hours of Dec. 14. The couple’s bodies were discovered in the master bedroom by their daughter around 12 hours later, and Nick Reiner was arrested that night in South L.A. by Los Angeles police.

Nick Reiner was charged with two counts of first-degree murder on Dec. 16 and has yet to enter a plea. In January, his arraignment was postponed to Monday after his lawyer, famed defense attorney Alan Jackson, stepped down and was replaced by a public defender.

Nick Reiner has a history of struggles with mental health and substance use. It is unclear how prominently those struggles will feature in criminal proceedings.

Times staff writers James Queally and Richard Winton contributed to this report.

A singular, inventive and touchingly intimate documentary, director Anna Fitch’s Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird), co-directed and edited by Banker White, recounts the life of Yolanda “Yo” Shea, a free-spirited Swiss immigrant born in the 1920s whom Fitch (in her 40s now) was close friends with right up until Yo’s death. Although this tender portrait — told with puppetry, collages, nearly animated still photographs and candid film footage taken while Yo was alive — is limned with grief, it’s ultimately a deeply joyful work, crafted with painstaking care and precision.

Both Fitch and White appear in front of the camera a fair bit here, but their presence never feels self-indulgent, and they certainly never upstage the star of the show, Yo herself. It’s just that, as Anna’s voiceover implies, a bit of contextualization is needed to understand how these two women from very different generations came to be such good friends. Turns out they had lots in common: Both were only children; both artists, although Fitch trained as an entomologist at first (she’s made several nature documentaries featuring bugs, and caterpillars get a major supporting role here); both weren’t from California originally, although that’s where they ended up living; both became mothers; both have strikingly full heads of wavy hair, and so on.

The whimsical listing of parallel experiences major and minor has a (slightly faux) naïve, recitative quality, as if we were looking at things through the eyes of a child. That suits the artless, unfiltered way Yo describes her life, spending a fair amount of time recollecting her own childhood. Meanwhile, 1/3 scale sets that Fitch builds of Yo’s dinky little house, and the even smaller models of 19th Street in Pacific Grove where that house was located, obviously evoke dolls’ houses, just a little bit bigger and constructed to facilitate filming sequences inside them re-enacting scenes from Yo’s last years. Everything inside this tiny, pastel-colored, seaside bungalow where Yo lived is recreated in miniature, down to the blankets on her bed, the fireplace and perhaps (although I can’t entirely confirm this last one) the ounce-sized bags of weed Yo smokes her way through, having been a pothead most of her adult life.

But before we get to an accounting of her druggy years, including a fateful acid trip that changed her life, we learn about her childhood in Italian-speaking Switzerland being raised by conventional parents apparently baffled by the weird, naturally rebellious kid they’d raised. At one point, as we hear Yo talking about her early years, the film cuts in luridly Technicolor footage from a 1955 German children’s film, Der Struwwelpeter, directed by Fritz Genschow, an adaptation of the classic folk tale about a tonsorially unkempt character who cuts off the fingers of disobedient children who don’t cut their nails or comb their hair.

Those clips go very well with the mildly eerie atmosphere that counters the notes of sweetness throughout — apt given that Yo was clearly a complicated character, loving toward her four children but also angry, fearless and determined to pursue her own truth, even if that meant making herself homeless to spend a long time hitchhiking up and down Highway One, the children left behind with her ex-husband. One anecdote about attending her own mother’s funeral and the reception afterwards, and getting so stoned with her husband’s brother she decides to have sex with him in her late mother’s bed, sort of sums Yo up — perhaps in a not entirely flattering way.

And yet it’s hard not to admire and warm to this unflinchingly honest, eccentric woman, especially the one we meet in her last years, worn thin by age but still beautiful, with a beady, impish gaze. A proper hippie to the end, she has no embarrassment about letting Anna film her naked in the bathtub while she chats away to a visiting helper.

She takes delight in so many things, even things that frighten her, like birds, a phobia she’s had since childhood but that doesn’t stop her from putting out nuts for a demanding blue jay she’s befriended. At one point, she remembers telling a guidance counselor as a teen that she didn’t want to work with children because she didn’t like them, even found them frightening. And yet she had those four kids, met here now in their own late middle age, and she’s affectionate and grandmotherly when seen bouncing Anna and Banker’s own infant daughter, who later insists on sharing her copy of Pat the Bunny with Yo as the latter lies in a hospital bed.

We learn that Yo went to art school in the end, and became close friends with artists of her generation, including Dadaist scultptor Jean Tinguely. But what’s interesting is that the film never tries to make out that Yo herself is a historically significant character. She’s just someone the filmmakers knew, loved and spent time with. But based on what we see here, she was remarkable in her own right — in many ways no less deserving of the documentary treatment than anyone else, a formidable woman and an indomitable spirit.

White’s jaunty editing ensures the proceedings roll merrily along, and yet the richness of detail in every frame makes this feel longer than its lean 71-minute running time, but not at all in a negative way. A varied smattering of classical music cuts, ranging from Bach fugues to snatches from Carmen and Madame Butterfly and a smidge of minimalist maestro Terry Riley, add a touch of formal dignity that complements the narrative.