Nuremberg
First screened and reviewed in November 2025
Director: James Vanderbilt. Cast: Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Leo Woodall, Richard E. Grant, Wrenn Schmidt, Mark O'Brien, Lydia Peckham, Colin Hanks, Lotte Verbeek, Fleur Bremmer, Andreas Pietschmann, Tom Keune, Peter Jordan, Dieter Riesle, Paul Antony-Barber. Screenplay: James Vanderbilt (based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai). In Brief:
Unusual choice of protagonist both adds and limits interest. Pedestrian style and several lapses. At least it's earnest.
VOR:③
Those well-versed in these events may skip this with impunity. But beyond Crowe's striking work, it's timely and valuable in more ways than one.
Look, I'd have loved for this movie to be stronger. James Vanderbilt offers further evidence that he is not an ace choice to direct his own scripts, both because he has a limited imagination for staging and visuals and because he doesn't recognize pitfalls that an outside eye might have spotted and ameliorated. Some of these gaffes are as small as dialogue that is embarrassingly boilerplate ("You're going to have to start with Göring." / "Hermann Göring??" / "That's the one.") to unsnagged felonies against syntax ("...nor will you be given anything with which to use as a weapon!"). Some are as major as Vanderbilt's pronounced difficulty in dramatizing Justice Robert Jackson's plotline for the first half of his 148-minute movie, consigning his interpreter, Michael Shannon (actually "and Michael Shannon"), to perfunctory versions of reenacted events and to scene partners who only exist to draw him out into blatantly expository dialogues.
The other half of Nuremberg winds up feeling like 80% of it, because Russell Crowe is as meticulous and dimensional as you've heard in the role of Göring and because, even if Rami Malek continues to betray marked limits as a performer, he at least gets more exciting exchanges and a couple of emotional beats to play. It's an odd but often rewarding choice to have positioned the U.S. Army psychologist as our chief window into the saga of the Nuremberg trials, stipulating that this decision would have been better served by a filmmaker with any knack for evoking characters' headspaces. I had trouble with lots of editing choices, local and general, questioned the necessity of a couple of characters (like the female journalist whose name I'm not positive we learned in her half-dozen scenes), and felt every one of those 148 minutes, especially the ones laden down with Brian Tyler's nondescriptly solemn score. Nuremberg is the kind of movie that thinks we need cutaways to various second-tier characters amid the climactic courtroom jousts, muttering little phrases to telegraph which side seems to be winning or stumbling at that second. I'm not sure if this betrays less trust in the leads' performances or in us as viewers. And even this is preferable to the interpolated closeups of almost every named character as they watch then-rare footage of the massive pileups of half-rotted corpses—not just corpses, mass-murdered people—in Buchenwald and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. Where do you go as an actor in this moment: the single tear? the stony shock? the full-faced horror? Why does Vanderbilt even opt for these inserts? Might these images, of all images, speak for themselves?
All of this said, I'm leery of dwelling on the mediocrity of the movie because I found it a humbling and valuable experience anyway. And if I'm going to ding Vanderbilt so much, I also merit some critique of myself. I saw Nuremberg on its last day of screenings within Chicago, deterred by lukewarm reviews and hung up, as I know many of you also get, by this seasonal question: "Do I need to see this movie, just in case it pulls down some big nominations?" I texted three friends more or less this very query in the last couple days, but as I sat in Seat G8, I was pretty disappointed in myself. Mightn't it have been sufficient enticement to come learn more than I knew about the Nuremberg trials? Remembering some ways and discovering many others in which these trials were nearly lost by the side we now recall as inevitable winners? Acknowledging how close they came for multiple reasons to not transpiring at all? Isn't this a good time to reconnect to the tricky but vital proposition of a world court with real power, prudently and persuasively exercised, even against those countries that might hold the most sway within its operations?
All too briefly at the finish, Nuremberg makes clear that Malek's character spent many, increasingly unhappy years trying to warn the world of the inevitability of fascist recrudescence, even or especially in the U.S. As with many parts of the movie, I think Vanderbilt has misjudged the pacing and pitch of what amounts to an epilogue, which might have been greatly expanded. Maybe he didn't want to repeat his Zodiac script with another can't-let-go crusader whose passion for truth and justice became an albatross. Maybe he thought this point worked better as a stinger on our way out, and would only feel banalized or belabored if explored at greater scale. In any case, this intriguing gesture winds up feeling like another botch, but I'm still glad Vanderbilt included it. Not long before, Nuremberg semi-stumbles into another meaningful moment, this time pushing a half-realized character into literal center-stage, so as to underline that this prosecution, spearheaded by an American with the backing of the U.S. Army, lived or died on at least one decisive intervention (and surely more) by our partner nations. The movie thus trades in its expected triumphalist arc, however briefly, for an anti-imperialist brief on behalf of multinational coalition. I wish we knew this character better earlier, and I'm not sure the beat lands as strongly or as critically as it ought to. Still, however these choices fare aesthetically, I appreciated these windows into (I might even say, this direct telegraphing of) why this movie got made now. Don't we all wish there were only one reason?
When there are only six people at a screening, the other five become pretty vivid to you, and I can't stop thinking about the gentlemen in the front row who required many minutes to navigate with his walker to his seat, while making clear he didn't want or need any assistance. It would be hard to describe just how much his slightest gestures were prolonged (taking off his coat, delving into his bag for food brought from home). The bathroom was a real ordeal; he didn't want any help there, either. I can only assume he elected upon what can't have been the simplest way to spend his day because he thought it was that important or that compelling to see Nuremberg—to make contact with this weighty episode, no matter how much was already familiar to him. And I bet on his way in, he wasn't wondering if Crowe has a shot with SAG, if not with Oscar, and if an afternoon will later feel wasted if those eventualities don't come to pass.
Talk about coaxing out headspace, even at cost of extravagant projection: this guy's presence and demeanor ported me out of a reluctant, box-checking mentality that I'm sorry to say I brought with me into Screen 3 and opened me up to the real work and worthy intention of a movie easy to pigeonhole as generic and pretty obviously flawed awards bait. Nuremberg looks and sounds like the most textbook instance of that benighted category, when a more textured realization by a more supple, discerning director might have made it seem like more. That part's on Vanderbilt. But even in its spotty shape—at times inspired, at times hackneyed or malformed, mostly just pedestrian—Nuremberg doesn't deserve to be trivialized. And if you're asking me if you should see it, even though I absolutely questioned more in it than I admired, I'd say yes. Grade:C–
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
