Russell Crowe and Rami Malek spar in James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, a film arriving to mark the 80th anniversary of the first international trials of Nazi leaders in late 1945. Adapted from Jack El‑Hai’s 2013 book about the unlikely rapport between Berkeley psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Hermann Goering—the highest-ranking Nazi tried at Nuremberg—the movie follows Kelley’s assignment to determine whether the defendants were fit to stand trial and traces the complicated relationship that develops between doctor and subject up to Goering’s testimony.
At just under two-and-a-half hours, the trial itself doesn’t dominate until the second half, and the film’s pacing and tone are uneven. The opening stretches feel slow and labored, and Vanderbilt’s attempts to liven proceedings sometimes misfire: clumsy asides, awkward contrivances and a jarring reliance on voiceover disrupt the flow. A whimsical, technicolor take on Rudolf Hess’s parachute landing in Scotland feels out of place, and a few running gags land while others fall flat.
There are successful moments. A magician’s sleight-of-hand motif yields an imaginative payoff, and when the film narrows to intimate confrontations, it can be compelling. Crowe’s Hermann Goering is often reduced to bluster and a pronounced German accent, but when allowed complexity he is more interesting; Malek’s Douglas Kelley bristles with a mix of impotent and righteous anger that hints at a tragic unraveling. Their on-screen chemistry is often electrifying. Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant provide riveting presence in the prosecution’s corner, anchoring the courtroom sequences with authority.
Yet many setups feel overworked and underdeveloped. Subplots fizzle, characters flare briefly into importance and then vanish, and the epilogue skims past Kelley’s final, lonely years. A dramatic discovery about Kelley’s posttrial fate—an astonishing detail worth more than the fleeting text before the credits—receives only perfunctory treatment. Given Malek’s range, a deeper, more sustained study of Kelley’s fall from grace would have been a richer, more courageous choice.
Vanderbilt also takes on large moral and psychological questions: What is the nature of evil? Can people who commit crimes against humanity be judged as sane and accountable, or do such acts demand explanations outside ordinary morality? This is where the film is at its strongest. The U.S. prosecution’s decision to present a compiled documentary—Exhibit 230, the horrific footage of concentration camp atrocities—was a pivotal courtroom moment, and Vanderbilt stages the screening with deserved weight. In El‑Hai’s account, Goering reportedly mutters, “It was all going so well and then they showed that awful film,” a line that exposes his callousness and awareness of guilt. The movie, however, mostly sidelines that nuance: Crowe’s Goering dismisses the material as fake, and the film funnels the drama toward a climactic cross-examination in which Kelley helps force Goering into an uncompromising declaration of loyalty to Hitler. That construction serves a character-driven tale of a maverick psychiatrist and a struggling prosecutor, but it simplifies Goering into a foil whose rhetorical power is set up only to be easily undone.
Nuremberg joins a long lineage of screen treatments of the trials, including the towering performances in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Brian Cox’s searing Goering in the 2000 miniseries Nuremberg. It also lands in our age of instant psychological labeling—where talk of “narcissists” and snippets of armchair diagnosis saturate feeds—making some of Vanderbilt’s clinical shorthand feel contemporary but sometimes disposable.
Kelley’s real dilemma, and the film’s most unsettling intellectual thrust, is his conclusion that the Nazis were not inexplicable demonic exceptions but disturbingly ordinary men. In both his posttrial writings and Vanderbilt’s adaptation, Kelley finds unsettling continuities between his own temperament and traits he observed in the defendants. This is the disquieting kinship Hannah Arendt later described at Adolf Eichmann’s trial as the “banality of evil”: that monstrous deeds can spring from bureaucratic, thoughtless compliance and ordinary personalities rather than metaphysical malevolence.
Accepting Kelley’s verdict—that the capacity for atrocity is a latent part of human reality—is a terrifying, inconvenient responsibility. It removes the comfort of explaining genocidal wickedness as the work of superhuman villains and instead forces a confronting of human potential. Vanderbilt’s film raises that crucial question but too often chooses safer storytelling shortcuts, skimming over complexities it might have interrogated more boldly. The result is a movie with fine performances and provocative aims, but one that neglects opportunities for deeper psychological and moral inquiry.
