James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg—timed for the 80th anniversary of the first postwar trials—aims high, dramatizing the fraught encounter between Berkeley psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley and Hermann Goering. Based on Jack El‑Hai’s book, the film follows Kelley’s assignment to assess the defendants’ fitness for trial and then traces the psychological sparring that culminates in the courtroom. Russell Crowe plays Goering and Rami Malek plays Kelley; Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant turn up strong as prosecutors.
At roughly two and a half hours, Vanderbilt delays the trial until about midway through the film, a structural choice that exposes gaps in pacing and tone. The first half often feels slow and mannered; attempts to energize it land unequally. Misjudged contrivances, awkward asides and intrusive voiceover interrupt the gravity of the material. A technicolored, comic home‑movie framing of Rudolf Hess’s crash in Scotland feels incongruous next to the other, darker moments. Running jokes and recurring bits register intermittently rather than knitting the pieces together.
There are moments of genuine craft. A magician’s sleight‑of‑hand motif develops into an inventive payoff, and Vanderbilt stages the U.S. prosecution’s decision to show Exhibit 230—the compiled documentary of the camps—effectively. The cast is a real asset: Shannon and Grant deliver riveting, focused prosecutorial performances; Crowe can be persuasive when the script allows him layers beyond bluster and bombast; and Malek is most compelling when Kelley’s mixture of moral certainty and impotent fury begins to unravel. When Crowe and Malek are permitted room to breathe, their exchanges crackle.
But many of the film’s dramatic setups feel labored. Plotlines open with promise and then fizzle, characters loom large for a scene and then recede, and the intense closed‑room confrontations that should be the film’s center of gravity are often undercut by surrounding flabbiness. The epilogue is especially disappointing: Kelley’s lonely final years and a striking revelation about his fate are summarized in a few curt lines of end‑credit text rather than dramatized, a missed chance to explore the moral and personal fallout of his conclusions. Malek’s range hints at a far darker, more Cassandra‑like portrait of Kelley; skimming past that descent is a squandered opportunity for deeper psychological drama.
Part of the unevenness comes from the enormity of the questions the film repeatedly raises: Do perpetrators of mass atrocity forfeit their humanity? Is legal judgment adequate? What does sanity mean in the face of systematic evil? Vanderbilt does his best work when he leans into these debates rather than theatrical flourishes. Historically important choices—like the prosecution’s screening of Exhibit 230—are staged powerfully, though the movie softens some responses. El‑Hai records Goering’s reported quip that it had been going so well until they showed “that awful film,” a line that reveals a chilling mix of awareness and lack of empathy. In Vanderbilt’s version, Crowe’s Goering more readily dismisses the footage as fakery, and the script recasts him primarily as an intellectual demagogue who can be toppled in courtroom sparring. That simplification reduces the darker ambiguity of Goering’s personality.
Nuremberg must live in the long shadow of earlier treatments—the 1961 Judgement at Nuremberg among them—and it arrives into a media culture quick to apply diagnostic labels. That context arguably heightens the need for a nuanced psychological portrait, and it’s here that the film most frequently falls short. Douglas Kelley’s insistence—on the page and in the film—that these men were not demons but ordinary people capable of extraordinary evil is the story’s most unsettling lesson. That insight echoes Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil and is the provocative, difficult kernel Vanderbilt keeps returning to. Unfortunately, the movie too often skirts the moral and psychological courage required to follow that idea to its full, uncomfortable conclusion.
Nuremberg raises the right questions and boasts striking performances, but its uneven tone and missed opportunities undercut an otherwise ambitious project. It reminds viewers of the trial’s moral stakes while stopping short of the deeper, riskier portrait it promises.