I found it kind of one-sided... It's hard to know what his motivations were, and I wish James explored that more.

| Aug 17, 2023

Very interesting. Some people -- like myself -- would just call this movie "A Spy." But that's okay!

| Aug 17, 2023

Riding the coattails of Oppenheimer, this documentary suffers from a drift into hagiography.

| Aug 8, 2023

This absorbing, thoughtful film doesn’t take sides... Instead, via interviews, film clips and dramatic re-creations, A Compassionate Spy revisits the changing world the Halls passed through together.

| Aug 7, 2023

The film leaves no doubt Ted Hall was a brilliant man, and that he and Joan had a beautiful marriage. His legacy beyond that remains a subject of intense debate.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2023

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

| Aug 4, 2023

The meticulous, intimate documentary registers as a footnote to [Christopher Nolan's] Oppenheimer, but with its more modest ambitions, it achieves greater clarity about the fraught political history surrounding the atom bomb’s creation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2023

What’s effective and touching in “A Compassionate Spy” relates directly to the satisfaction of getting to know Joan Hall, a terrifically vital and reflective presence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 4, 2023

Even with some missing nuance and a lack of skeptical or critical voices, it contains enough ambiguity—particularly from Ted Hall himself—to open up discussion on a wider ground.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 4, 2023

"A Compassionate Spy" takes a far more rose-tinted, one-note view of Hall—a tack that requires skirting past major conflicting particulars and eschewing the very uncertainty that Hall himself exhibits in numerous archival interviews.

Full Review | Aug 4, 2023

The dramatizations are nicely filmed, if a little hokey, and the overall velvety tone is peppered with piquant details...

| Aug 3, 2023

Hall’s smaller story makes for a timely footnote to Nolan’s magnum opus.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 1, 2023

This first-rate portrait gets intimate with an atomic-age Edward Snowden, all the better to cast a long shadow.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2023

The documentary doubles as a mournful reflection on the age of nuclear proliferation — and a tribute to those who opposed the buildup.

| Feb 27, 2023

The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 7, 2022

A Compassionate Spy borrows the look and feel of a historical espionage thriller and builds some momentum and moral complexity along the way, but it finds its real potency as a generational family drama.

| Sep 2, 2022

Steve James’ A Compassionate Spy is ultimately a minor addition to one of documentary cinema’s great bodies of work, but it might just contain the one true secret to a happy marriage: sharing historically significant nuclear secrets.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 2, 2022

It’s worth being reminded by James’s layered, grippingly told account of a principled betrayal that when it comes to the biggest threats facing the globe, sometimes one person in the right circumstance can make a difference.

| Sep 2, 2022

The film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.

| Sep 2, 2022