By Rick Bentley

FILM: Rails & Ties
CAST: Marcia Gay Harden, Kevin Bacon, Miles Heizer
DIRECTION: Alison Eastwood

First-time director Alison Eastwood, daughter of Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood, has created a movie that is stark in look but rich in emotion.
Tom Stark (Kevin Bacon) is a train engineer. His job is a metaphor for his life. Stark moves straight ahead with little regard for the landscape that brushes up against his world.
But he’s forced to look in a different direction as his wife Megan Stark (Marcia Gay Harden) battles cancer. Then Tom gets another jolt when his train slams into the car of a woman who wants to commit suicide.
The emotional baggage Tom carries manifests itself in Davey (Miles Heizer), the son of the suicide victim. Davey was unable to pull his mother from the car before the train hit it.
When Davey visits the Starks’ home to confront the engineer for not stopping his train, Tom can’t deal with the youngster. To Tom, Davey represents the reason he might lose his job, the pain he feels over how a loved one is dealing with hopelessness and the child the Starks never had because they thought they had all the time in the world.
In a move defying logical thinking, Tom agrees to let Davey stay. His presence in the house gives Megan a reprieve from her painful slide into the cold grip of death.
Except for the train crash, Eastwood stages her film like a three-person play. That decision proves fortuitous because it allows three very good actors the chance to make their characters feel very real.
It is easy to suggest an actor should be considered for an Oscar just because she plays someone dealing with a fatal disease. What makes Harden’s performance so powerful, though, is not how she embraces the end but how she hangs on to the beauty of life. Her grip is fierce, even when she has every reason just to give up.
There’s nothing fancy about Eastwood’s directing, but that works just fine. When so many powerful emotional moments are put together, there’s no need to distract viewers. -MCT

Boxing drama

FILM: A Fighting Man
CAST: Louis Gossett Jr, Famke Janssen, Sheila McCarthy, Dominic Purcell
DIRECTION: Damian Lee

Writer-director Damian Lee is perhaps better known for his low-budget efforts, and while not all hit their intended mark, the filmmaker’s latest film, A Fighting Man is one of his best to date.
In this tale of hope, redemption and forgiveness, we see two boxers fighting in the ring as the story of how the pair got there, is played out in flashbacks.
Over-the-hill ex-boxer Sailor O’Connor has just learned his mother is dying of cancer.
With the doctor predicting she has six months left, Sailor comes out of retirement for one last fight, to pay for a trip so his mother can see her native Ireland a final time.
Sailor’s (Dominic Purcell) opponent is the young up-and-comer King Solomon (Izaak Smith), a fighter with something to prove. He has a new wife and a baby on the way. The fight has been put together by an unscrupulous boxing promoter who has been imaginatively named Fast Eddie (Adam Beach).
King is escaping a homelife where his mother is a junkie and boxing offers him a future.
The film has an impressive cast of older actors, who play the boxers’ corner men, with James Caan, Louis Gossett Jr and Michael Ironside.
A Fighting Man, both entertaining and effective, is like a cross between Rocky and Cinderella Man, only done on a much smaller scale.

Spook-tacular adventure

FILM: Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend?
CAST: Bella Thorne, Madison Pettis, Ryan Ochoa
DIRECTION: Peter Hewitt

A sequel to the 2008 film, Mostly Ghostly: Who Let the Ghosts Out?, this film is based on the second book in the Mostly Ghostly series created by R L Stine.
Max Doyle (Ryan Ochoa) has eyes only for Cammie (Bella Thorne), the smart, popular red head girl in school.
When Max finally scores a date with Cammie on a special evening, Phears, an evil ghost with plans to take over the world, unleashes his ghouls and things goes haywire.
With the help of his ghostly pals, Tara and Nicky, can Max thwart Phears’ evil plot, help reunite his ghost friends with their long-lost parents and still make his date with Cammy? Mostly Ghostly: Have You Met My Ghoulfriend? is a spook-tacular adventure.

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha