James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, arriving on the 80th anniversary of the postwar tribunals, dramatizes the odd, uneasy bond between Berkeley psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Hermann Goering, adapted from Jack El‑Hai’s account. Russell Crowe plays the highest‑ranking Nazi tried at Nuremberg while Rami Malek portrays Kelley, sent to assess whether the defendants were competent to stand trial. The film traces their charged interactions through prep, testimony and the courtroom’s moral crucible.
At roughly two and a half hours, Vanderbilt’s picture divides itself awkwardly. The first half lingers on build‑up and character detail in a manner that often feels slow and mannered; the trial proper doesn’t dominate until later. Vanderbilt’s attempts to inject variety sometimes backfire: clumsy asides, an intrusive voiceover, and tonal detours — a whimsically stylized take on Rudolf Hess’s parachute landing, for example — disrupt momentum more than they enrich it. A few running jokes land, others don’t, leaving the film uneven in rhythm and purpose.
When it tightens its focus, however, Nuremberg can be powerful. A recurring magician motif leads to an imaginative payoff, and the movie is at its best in close, confrontational scenes. Crowe’s Goering is often loud and performative, foregrounding bluster and a heavy accent, but Crowe hints at deeper layers when the script allows. Malek’s Kelley is a bristling, anguished presence — equal parts moral indignation and fragile unraveling — and the pair generate genuine electricity on screen. Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant bolster the proceedings as prosecutors, lending authority and urgency to the courtroom sequences.
The film’s principal weakness is its scattershot attention. Promising subplots and secondary figures flare briefly and then evaporate; the epilogue rushes past Kelley’s later, lonely years. A striking fact about Kelley’s posttrial fate, one that would have deserved a fuller, more dramatic treatment, is offered almost as an afterthought in the credits rather than being integrated into the narrative’s emotional arc. Given Malek’s range, a more sustained portrait of Kelley’s descent would have been a braver choice.
Vanderbilt repeatedly returns to the film’s weightiest questions: What is evil? Can perpetrators of atrocities be judged as sane and morally responsible, or must we look for explanations that place them beyond ordinary human failings? The movie handles one key courtroom moment with deserved gravity — the U.S. prosecution’s decision to present Exhibit 230, the documentary footage of concentration‑camp horrors. That screening is staged as a pivotal hinge, and in the source account Goering reportedly reacts with a revealing mutter that exposes guilt and callousness. The film, however, largely sidelines that nuance: Crowe’s Goering dismisses the material as fabricated, and Vanderbilt reshapes the arc toward a climactic cross‑examination in which Kelley helps coax from Goering an uncompromising pledge of loyalty to Hitler. It makes for dramatic, character‑driven cinema, but it also simplifies Goering into a foil whose rhetorical power the screenplay sets up mainly to be toppled.
Nuremberg sits in a long cinematic lineage — from Judgment at Nuremberg to later dramatizations — and it speaks to our present moment of quick psychological labels and armchair diagnoses. That makes some of Vanderbilt’s clinical shorthand feel topical but sometimes disposable. The film’s most disturbing intellectual claim, borrowed from Kelley’s own writings, is that the defendants were not monstrous exceptions but frighteningly ordinary men — an echo of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” Accepting that conclusion forces an uncomfortable reckoning: the capacity for atrocity as a latent human possibility rather than the product of superhuman villainy.
Vanderbilt raises that essential question repeatedly, and the film contains striking performances and provocative ideas. But too often it opts for safer storytelling shortcuts and undercooks complexities that deserved more interrogation. The result is a movie with moments of genuine power and a central moral ambition that it never fully explores.