"Nuremberg"

☆☆☆

It's an awful, damning truth that far too many Americans — and, based on global affairs, it can be assumed citizens of many other countries — don't know enough about World War II and the atrocities committed by Nazis in Germany. For those who don't know enough, Nuremberg will be an effective introduction into the famous war-crime trials and the still-incomprehensible acts that they covered.

For everyone else, Nuremberg feels like a three-part network miniseries from the 1980s, filled with recognizable actors of normally fine quality hamming it up and delivering performances of such varying quality and efficacy that you wonder if they were all called in to film their scenes on different days.

Reducing Nuremberg to the same level as, say, War and Remembrance or the movie in which George C. Scott played Benito Mussolini undermines a little of the film's intended importance, and there are some moments in Nuremberg that attain the gravitas the filmmakers were going for, but they are too few. More often, it's a movie in which English-speaking actors strive mightily to emote with distracting, unintentionally funny German accents. It's a movie in which the raw truth of what happened during and after World War II is overwhelmed by too much gloss and an ill-conceived glamour.

It's possible Nuremberg might have worked a little better if it had been made a few years ago, before the harrowing, sobering Zone of Interest, but with scenery-chewing lead performances by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, both of whom are rather badly miscast, it's hard to imagine this version of Nuremberg being anything but a big-budget, glossy, slickly edited misfire.

And yet ... 

Halfway through Nuremberg, scenes from the real black-and-white documentary shot by John Ford that was used at the Nuremberg Trials take center screen, and they are as harrowing now as they were 80 years ago. To watch this footage is to feel the overwhelming pain and the mental inability to process the images of so much death, torture, incomprehensible violence and cruelty, to understand that what you're seeing is pure, unadulterated evil. The decision to show this footage is the best decision writer-director James Vanderbilt makes in this long, disjointed film. How Ford and his crews managed to film these images, much less to edit them together and supervise their production, is itself a great wonder.

The rest of Nuremberg can't come close to achieving anything like the magnitude of emotion those few minutes convey. In part, that's because of a script that never settles on a tone, opening with a scene that feels uncomfortably like a romantic comedy before focusing its story on the psychiatrist (Rami Malek) who spent time questioning and getting to know Nazi leader Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe). It's an odd story, no matter how true it is, and an even odder decision to focus Nuremberg on this specific relationship, rather than, say, the here-tangential story of the actual preparation for the trials and the role of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon).

There are uncomfortable echoes of The Silence of the Lambs as Malek's earnest young doctor gets a little too close to his subject and tries to ply him for information. There's also an extraneous — but undeniably affecting — subplot involving the young translator (Leo Woodall, whose American accent is far superior to his German) who becomes a more important figure as the film wears on. There are so many supporting roles in Nuremberg, so many small subplots, that the film begins to resemble a 1970s disaster movie, and threatens to become more soap opera than disturbing tragedy.

Despite the often-silly performances by its leading actors and the expansive, sometimes meandering script, Nuremberg is never less than entertaining. Maybe that's the problem. A movie about the Holocaust and its atrocities of immeasurable proportion should be a lot of things — insightful, relevant, shocking, uncomfortable, disturbing, depressing, overpowering ... but entertaining? It's both a blessing and curse for this movie that remains worth seeing despite its significant shortcomings.

Viewed November 15, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6

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