It’s weird, in the year 2025, that it seems timely to point out that the Nazis were bad. But Nuremberg, an old-fashioned and satisfyingly complex morality tale in the guise of a courtroom drama and spy thriller, does that job in impressive style. Supercharged by James Vanderbilt’s smart script and snappy direction, and with an on-form cast, it plots a course through the immediate aftermath of World War II and into the legal nightmare of holding its German perpetrators to account.
If Russell Crowe seemed a cartoonish choice to play avuncular Nazi second-in-command Hermann Göring, he delivers his best performance since The Nice Guys a full decade ago, paradoxically dialling things back to prove that he’s not a faded force. Rami Malek returns to something like Bohemian Rhapsody form as the American psychologist, Douglas Kelley, sent to the Allies’ high security Nuremberg prison to evaluate him and his fellow Nazis.
Appearances are deceptive throughout this psychologically acute and entertaining dramatisation of the Nuremberg war trials of 1945. Göring seems jovial and harmless; Keeley seems in control of their sessions in the Nazi’s small cell. Straight-arrow American prosecutor Robert H Jackson (Michael Shannon) and his gin-sipping British counterpart (Richard E Grant) seem to have a copper-bottomed plan to send Göring and his fellow war criminals, including the deeply odious Robert Ley and Julius Streicher, to the gallows. ‘Eisenhower is not for hanging anyone without a trial,’ Jackson is told. ‘He also wants the trial done so we can get on with hanging them.’
But Nuremberg cleverly shows how out-of-control they all were – with the exception of the purringly self-satisfied Göring, who has laid a trap for his prosecutors. Tables are turned and turned again. The toxicity of this band of unrepentant, affronted Nazis infects everyone trapped in this hermetic legal universe with them. Even the Pope, in one startling encounter with Jackson, is tarnished by association.
It’s weird that it seems timely to point out that the Nazis were bad
Unlike Stanley Kramer’s 1961 legal procedural Judgment at Nuremberg, the courtroom scenes don’t kick in until much later in the film. Instead, Kelley’s suffocating, ever-shifting dynamic with Göring – ‘vee are friends, are vee not?’ – dominates. The ambitious psychologist is slowly compromised as a go-between with the Nazi’s wife and further undone by the pressure to betray his patients’ confidences. You watch the shrink literally shrinking.
Leo Woodall gets his moment as Kelley’s translator and John Slattery turns the camp’s sharp-tongued commandant into a wisecracking highlight. The female roles are disappointingly thin: Wrenn Schmidt is Jackson’s worried assistant, Lotte Verbeek is Göring’s despairing wife and Lydia Peckham is a journalist-cum-honeytrap, and it wouldn’t take long to add up their lines.
But almost everyone here is a real-life figure and you can feel archival poring that went into the research (Jack El-Hai’s nonfiction book The Nazi And The Psychiatrist is the main source). It lends authenticity and intellectual rigour to this extraordinary, century-defining event. Crowe and co do the rest.
In US theaters now. In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Nov 14.