Nuremberg (2025)
Directed by James Vanderbilt
There’s something deeply unsettling about watching Russell Crowe swagger through Nuremberg as Hermann Göring, and it isn’t just the historical weight of the character. It’s that Crowe is so magnificently watchable, so magnetically repulsive, that the movie seems to lose its moral footing every time he opens his mouth. James Vanderbilt’s film wants to probe the psychology of Nazi evil—to crawl inside the mind of a monster and figure out what makes him tick—but what it actually does is give us a two-hour demonstration of why such excavations are treacherous business.
The premise is promising enough. An American psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek with his characteristic intensity dialed down to something resembling professional restraint, is tasked with evaluating whether the captured Nazi leadership is mentally fit to stand trial. This was 1945, remember, when the very notion of “crimes against humanity” hadn’t yet been codified, when the legal architecture for prosecuting state-sponsored genocide was being invented on the fly. Kelley’s job is to determine whether these men are mad—whether their atrocities can be explained away as pathology—or whether they’re something more disturbing: perfectly sane individuals who chose barbarism.
Vanderbilt, who wrote the labyrinthine script for Zodiac and knows his way around obsession, structures the film as a psychological duel between Kelley and Göring. The first half plays like a chess match in a prison cell, all verbal feints and counter-feints, the psychiatrist trying to crack open his subject while the subject runs circles around him. There’s genuine tension in these scenes, a sense of two intellects testing each other. Göring toys with Kelley, flatters him, challenges him, plants seeds of doubt about American moral superiority. When he points out the hypocrisy of a nation outraged by concentration camps while celebrating the atomic incineration of Japanese cities, you feel the ground shift beneath your feet. It’s an uncomfortable moment precisely because it isn’t wrong—it’s just being deployed in the service of monstrous deflection.
Here’s where the movie starts to eat itself alive. Crowe’s Göring is so charismatic, so intellectually formidable, so perversely seductive, that Malek’s Kelley doesn’t stand a chance. The imbalance isn’t just a matter of screen presence, though that’s certainly part of it—Crowe fills the frame with the absolute confidence of a man who’s spent his career commanding attention, while Malek seems to shrink with each encounter. The deeper problem is conceptual. A film about the psychology of evil shouldn’t be structured so that evil walks away with every scene. When your Nazi comes across as more vital, more compelling, more fully realized than your American hero, you’ve made a strategic error that no amount of Holocaust footage can correct.
And there is Holocaust footage—archival images of the camps shown during the trial sequences, lingering far longer than dramatic necessity requires. Vanderbilt seems to believe that the sheer horror of these images will counterbalance Göring’s seductiveness, will remind us what we’re really dealing with. But the effect is oddly counterproductive. The footage exists in a different register entirely, documentary truth interrupting dramatic fiction, and the tonal whiplash only emphasizes how thoroughly the film has been captured by its villain’s gravitational pull. You can’t seduce an audience for ninety minutes and then sober them up with atrocity footage. The human psyche doesn’t work that way.
The second half of the picture settles into courtroom procedural, with Michael Shannon’s Justice Robert Jackson leading the prosecution. Shannon brings his usual granite authority to the role, but the trial scenes feel obligatory, a destination the film was always heading toward rather than something it genuinely wanted to explore. We get the familiar rhythms of legal drama—the strategic objections, the devastating testimony, the tension of cross-examination—but none of it carries the electric charge of those early Kelley-Göring confrontations. The movie peaked in a prison cell, and everything afterward feels like epilogue.
What Nuremberg never quite manages to articulate is a coherent theory of evil. Is it anthropological—something coded into human nature? Political—the product of specific historical circumstances? Pathological—the result of diseased minds? Vanderbilt gestures toward all these possibilities without committing to any of them. Kelley administers Rorschach tests and studies his subjects’ responses, but we never learn anything from these examinations that we couldn’t have guessed from watching the men interact. The psychological depth the film promises remains stubbornly superficial, a matter of dramatic suggestion rather than genuine insight.
The timing of the film’s release is hardly accidental. Vanderbilt clearly wants us to see Göring’s manipulative charm, his ability to seduce and dominate, as a warning about our present moment—a reminder that authoritarian charisma can flourish anywhere, that the seduction of the strongman is a permanent temptation. The parallels are obvious enough that they don’t need to be spelled out, and to his credit, Vanderbilt doesn’t spell them out. But the allegorical ambition sits uneasily with the film’s structural problems. If your cautionary tale about the dangers of charismatic evil succeeds primarily in demonstrating how charismatic evil can be, you haven’t quite landed the dismount.
Russell Crowe gives one of the most commanding performances of his career, which is precisely the problem. He makes Göring fascinating in ways that feel genuinely dangerous, not because the film endorses Nazi ideology—it doesn’t—but because it can’t help being more interested in its villain than in the people trying to bring him to justice. Nuremberg wants to look into the abyss and report back what it sees. What it actually proves is that the abyss has a way of looking back at you, and sometimes it winks.
