A Compassionate Spy

Name: A Compassionate Spy
Genre: Documentary
Released: August 4, 2023
Duration: 101 min
Rating: 72
Cast: Mickey O'Sullivan, Tom Goodwin

2023

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Generally favorable reviews based on 20 Critic Reviews

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A Compassionate Spy

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Movie Details & Credits

Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: August 4, 2023 | Not Rated

Starring: Mickey O'Sullivan, Tom Goodwin

Summary: A Compassionate Spy is a gripping real-life spy thriller about controversial Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall, who infamously provided nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, told through the perspective of his loving wife Joan, who protected his secret for decades. Recruited in 1944 as an 18-year-old Harvard undergraduate to help RobertA Compassionate Spy is a gripping real-life spy thriller about controversial Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall, who infamously provided nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, told through the perspective of his loving wife Joan, who protected his secret for decades. Recruited in 1944 as an 18-year-old Harvard undergraduate to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team create a bomb, Hall was the youngest physicist on the Manhattan Project, and didn’t share his colleagues’ elation after the successful detonation of the world’s first atomic bomb. Concerned that a U.S. post-war monopoly on such a powerful weapon could lead to nuclear catastrophe, Hall began passing key information about the bomb’s construction to the Soviet Union. After the war, he met, fell in love with, and married Joan, a fellow student with whom he shared a passion for classical music and socialist causes — and the explosive secret of his espionage. The pair raised a family while living under a cloud of suspicion and years of FBI surveillance and intimidation. … Expand

Director: Steve James

Genre(s): Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 101 min

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Critic Reviews

100

The Guardian Phil Hoad

Mar 22, 2023

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail. Read full review

Tim Grierson

Sep 9, 2022

A Compassionate Spy is intimate and modest, more about a marriage than geopolitical tensions. Read full review

Benjamin Franz

Aug 24, 2023

In preparing A Compassionate Spy, James seamed together a spellbinding collage concerning the life and times of Ted Hall and his family. It is a wonderful documentary, and I encourage everyone who wants a greater sense of the story of the Atomic Age to check it out. Read full review

Richard Roeper

Aug 3, 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. Read full review

Chris Vognar

Aug 4, 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. Read full review

IndieWire David Ehrlich

Sep 9, 2022

If A Compassionate Spy is oddly dispassionate for a documentary so attuned to the humanistic inner-workings of history in progress, the film can’t help but find a measure of beauty in the unspoken trust that Ted and Joan placed in one another. Read full review

The Daily Beast Nick Schager

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. Read full review

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