Midway through Nuremberg, prosecutors play for their Nuremberg trial attendees never-before-seen footage shot at various Nazi concentration camps, and James Vanderbilt’s drama more or less pauses its fictionalized action to gaze in horror, like its characters, at this appalling documentary material.
It’s a sequence of overpowering ghastliness, definitively making the proceedings’ case about the necessity of confronting the truth in order to achieve justice. It’s also, unfortunately, a high point never matched by the rest of the film, which is undone by storytelling that, however well-intentioned, coats its real-life tale in a corny Hollywood sheen.
Sixty-four years after Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg, Nuremberg (Nov. 7, in theaters) adapts Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist to tell the tale of shrink Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), who’s ordered by the military to Nuremberg to assess the last living members of the Nazi high command.
Of those captives, the most illustrious (i.e., despicable) is Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), whose pain pills are an immediate tip-off to Kelley that the Third Reich military and political leader—the designated successor to Adolph Hitler—is an opiate addict. This is merely another early sign of Kelley’s cunning intellectual acumen, which has already been suggested by an introductory scene on a train in which he shows off, to a beautiful passenger (Lydia Peckham) who’ll later be exposed as a journalist, a sleight-of-hand magic trick.
Despite the misgivings of Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), Kelley is brought in to analyze the Allied Forces’ valuable prisoners and, in doing so, to prevent them from committing suicide.
With a big cocky smile tattooed on his face, Malek oozes confidence as the psychiatrist, who after a single meeting with Göring deduces that the Nazi can speak English—a revelation that wows Sergeant Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), who serves as Kelley’s translator—and he almost immediately comes off as unflappably smug. In this regard, he’s well-paired with Göring, a heavyset villain who oozes arrogance like sweat, and whom Crowe embodies as a viper whose smiles and casual chitchat are a façade designed to mask his lethality.
Nuremberg is a cat-and-mouse contest between Kelley and Göring, with the former eventually gaining the confidence of the latter—or so he thinks—by flattering his sense of superiority, tolerating his evasions and swallowing his excuses, and delivering letters to his wife (Lotte Verbeek) and daughter (Fleur Bremmer).
That Kelley quickly befriends Mrs. Göring and her child is a clear ethical no-no, and yet Vanderbilt doesn’t care to complicate his protagonist. Instead, he saddles him with a formulaic character arc in which he grows close to Göring, then realizes that this is a fool’s game, and ultimately hits rock bottom before redeeming himself and figuratively saving the day. Never less than morally upstanding, he’s a two-dimensional protagonist rendered one-note by Malek’s creaky and unconvincing lead performance.
Speaking of awkwardness, Nuremberg simultaneously concentrates on Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), who risks his shot at becoming Chief Justice by spearheading the effort to stage an unprecedented international trial to hold the Nazis’ accountable for their sins.
Shannon exudes noble conviction as the legal bigwig but his every moment is a case study in orating to the audience, none clunkier than when, at an impasse due to Congress’ unwillingness to go along with his plan, he visits the Pope—who in 1936 signed an accord with the Nazi empire—and “blackmails” him into supporting the venture. That said, Vanderbilt shortchanges all his cast members by giving them similar soundbite-y parts, including Colin Hanks as psychiatrist Gustave Gilbert and Richard E. Grant as British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe.
Nuremberg is constructed like an old-fashioned awards-bait period piece, complete with trailer-ready lines of dialogue that put a neat-and-tidy button on scenes. There’s a mechanical quality to Vanderbilt’s plotting that negates the unexpected and enlightening; throughout, he’s content to relay familiar ideas about the nature of evil (and mankind’s capacity for it), the mechanisms of the Third Reich, and the virtues of democratic processes.
These notions are by and large true. However, the filmmaker expresses them bluntly, such that when Kelley learns that Göring’s wife and daughter have been arrested—which upsets him to a dubious degree—he tears into Andrus about America succumbing to the same ugliness as its enemies, announcing, “We’re supposed to be better than this!”
Every second of Nuremberg is so writerly as to stick out like a sore thumb. At a bar, Peckham’s reporter informs Kelley that due to the forthcoming trial, “this city’s about to become the greatest show on Earth!”
In his spartan cell, Göring butters up the doctor by asking to learn his magic trick, and he ultimately states that they’re alike because Kelley—who plans to make a mint penning a book about this experience—wants to be important, revered, and remembered. On the cusp of potential crisis, Triest tearfully opens up about his secret past so Kelley won’t quit on their mission. In these and other instances, it’s not the sentiments themselves that grate; instead, it’s their hokey and on-the-nose delivery.
Stately and inert, Nuremberg is a cookie-cutter throwback that’s hemmed in by convention. Vanderbilt plays things safe both in terms of form and content, and it’s the latter that’s ultimately most deflating about his feature directorial debut, whose conclusion is foregone and whose insights are minimal.
In a post-war coda, Kelley rails drunkenly on the radio about everyone’s (including Americans’) facility for fascistic atrocities—an outburst designed, not so subtly, to speak to our present moment. Yet even then, the message proves frustratingly pat and cursory, just as a closing title card about Kelley’s sad fate hints at pertinent issues that the preceding action barely touched upon.
Crowe’s imposing turn as Göring, a uniformed beast whose loyalty to country and self is amoral in the extreme, keeps the film from wholly devolving into a collection of tired therapy- and legal-thriller clichés. But especially in a 2025 rife with antisemitism and authoritarianism, its failure to say something new or complex—about the Holocaust, its perpetrators, and the difficulty of facing hard realities—makes it feel like a missed opportunity.
