We present a discriminative part-based approach for human action recognition from video sequences using motion features. Our model is based on the recently proposed hidden conditional random field~(hCRF) for object recognition. Similar to hCRF for object recognition, we model a human action by a flexible constellation of parts conditioned on image observations. Different from object recognition, our model combines both large-scale global features and local patch features to distinguish various actions. Our experimental results show that our model is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches in action recognition. In particular, our experimental results demonstrate that combining large-scale global features and local patch features performs significantly better than directly applying hCRF on local patches alone.