Russell Crowe and Rami Malek face off in James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, released to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the first postwar trials. Based on Jack El-Hai’s book about the encounter between Berkeley psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley and Hermann Goering, the film follows Kelley’s assignment to assess the defendants’ fitness for trial and traces his fraught relationship with Goering up to the courtroom.
At just under two-and-a-half hours, the film delays the trial until about midway through, and its pacing and tone are uneven. The first half often feels slow and plodding; in attempts to energize it, the production resorts to misjudged contrivances, awkward asides, and jarring voiceover. A comic, technicolored home‑movie framing of Rudolf Hess’s crash in Scotland feels wildly out of step with the subject. Running gags land inconsistently.
Some elements work: the magician’s sleight‑of‑hand motif has an inventive payoff. But a tongue‑in‑cheek echo of Crowe’s Gladiator leading war criminals into the courtroom sits poorly beside the stark archival footage of the camps. The cast is stellar—Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant deliver riveting prosecutorial performances, Crowe can be powerful when allowed genuine complexity beyond a braggadocious, accented bravado, and Malek excels when his psychiatrist unleashes the mix of impotent rage and righteousness that ultimately unravels him. When Crowe and Malek are given space, their chemistry is scintillating.
Yet setups around the intense huis clos are often labored: plotlines fizzle, characters suddenly loom large and then recede. The film’s epilogue is frustratingly brief, glossing over Kelley’s lonely final years. A stunning revelation about his fate deserves more than cursory end credits text. Malek’s range suggests a richer, darker portrait of Kelley’s descent into pariah and Cassandra would have been more compelling; to skim past that denouement feels like a missed opportunity for deeper psychological drama.
Part of the film’s unevenness stems from the heft of the themes it seeks to tackle. Long before the trials, public discourse obsessed over the nature of evil and mass psychology—a question Vanderbilt addresses when the film is at its best. Do perpetrators of crimes against humanity forfeit their own humanity? Is judgment legitimate? What does sanity mean in the face of genocidal crimes?
Historically, the U.S. prosecution made a dramatic choice at Nuremberg: rather than call witnesses like Gen. Eisenhower, they screened Exhibit 230, a compiled documentary exposing the Holocaust’s horrors. Vanderbilt stages that screening effectively, but the film softens Goering’s reaction. El-Hai recounts Goering’s reported quip, “It was all going so well and then they showed that awful film,” a remark that peels back hubris to reveal chilling awareness and lack of empathy. In the movie, Crowe’s Goering mostly dismisses the footage as fake news; instead, the narrative builds to a courtroom showdown in which Kelley helps trap Goering into reaffirming his fealty to Hitler. Casting Goering chiefly as a legal demagogue of prodigious intellect simplifies him into a figure too easily undermined when challenged.
Nuremberg arrives in a long line of films about the trials, standing in the shadow of Maximilian Schell and Spencer Tracy’s 1961 Judgement at Nuremberg and Brian Cox’s searing Goering in the 2000 miniseries. It also appears in a media environment saturated with diagnostic shorthand—where terms like “narcissist” and “Nazi” get tossed about in social feeds—making nuanced psychological portrayal more urgent.
Douglas Kelley, in his posttrial writings and in the film, resists explanations that cast the Nazis as demonic or otherworldly. Instead, he sees ordinary men capable of extraordinary evil—and, alarmingly, traits he recognizes in himself. That conclusion echoes Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” observation during the Eichmann trial: the worst atrocities can be carried out by unremarkable people performing ordinary roles. Accepting Kelley’s verdict—that capacity for atrocity can be disturbingly quotidian—is difficult and frightening, yet perhaps the most important lesson a film about Nuremberg can offer. Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg poses that question repeatedly but too often skirts the psychological courage required to answer it fully.
