conscience-stricken

Before seeing the work, I assumed that the author was picking a fight with Arthur Miller, whose play “The Crucible” immortalized the historical figure of John Proctor as a conscience-stricken hero.

The production, executed to perfection, starred Ron Bottitta and Patrick Keleher as the radicalized father and his conscience-stricken son in a tense dramatic standoff that told a story about America we’re still convulsively living through.

Sounds like a certain conscience-stricken assassin with a protective side and a buck-the-rules lawman searching for the truth should find a friendly middle ground, which, in Woo’s trademarked visual signaling, means weapons drawn face to face but firing past each other’s heads to kill the real threat.

Most of those who did get out were rescued only by the initiative of conscience-stricken troops and diplomats in Kabul, and by a loose network of tireless volunteers working around-the-clock stateside.

It’s to this rigorously intellectual and self-questioning filmmaker’s credit that he doesn’t present these parts of his oeuvre as anything but conscience-stricken stabs at making sense of it all.