The film's best and most carefully shaded performance belongs to Bacon.

I found the opening third tremendously intriguing and involving, I thought the emotions were so real they could be touched, but then the film lost its way and fell into the clutches of sentimental melodrama.

Everything looks professional if undistinguished.

Reserved, careful and largely predictable in the way it plays out its wrenching emotional crises.

Alison Eastwood's debut feature is slow, deliberate, assured, and shot with a graceful feel for place--none of which is enough to overcome the creaky themes that tie this hackneyed domestic drama together with fearsome symmetry.

Rails & Ties is like one bad TV movie that slammed into another.

Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.

While it features three strong performance and the debut of a promising filmmaker, the story line is obvious and rather melodramatic.

As lovely as some of the footage looks and as committed as are the three lead performances, they serve only to make Rails & Ties play like an exceptionally well-acted and well-made Lifetime movie.

A heartfelt but dramatically flat portrait of a couple grappling with one tragedy whose lives are profoundly affected by the outcome of another.

All the astute acting in the world can't bring such a preposterous story into the station on time and intact.

Nobody feels anything they're not explicitly told to feel. Not even the audience.

The film rings so consistently false that it's more likely to induce snickers and eye-rolling.

The only conceivable reason for Warner Bros. to (barely) release this mush is as a favor to Clint Eastwood, whose daughter Alison directed.