We perform an analytic and experimental study of line iterative methods for solving linear systems arising from finite difference discretizations of non-self-adjoint elliptic partial differential equations on two-dimensional domains. The methods consist of performing one step of cyclic reduction, followed by solution of the resulting reduced system by line relaxation. We augment previous analyses of one-line methods, and we derive a new convergence analysis for two-line methods, showing that both classes of methods are highly effective for solving the convection-diffusion equation. In addition, we compare the experimental performance of several variants of these methods, and we show that the methods can be implemented efficiently on parallel architectures.