Russell Crowe and Rami Malek give some of their career-best performances in the gripping historical drama NUREMBERG. Set immediately post-WWII, NUREMBERG focuses on an American Army psychiatrist, played by Rami, and Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering, played by Russell Crowe, as preparations are made for the international war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany.
The drama also centers on creating the post-WWII Nuremberg Nazi war crime tribunals, organized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, which that held the remaining leaders of the Nazi Germany regime to account for the regime’s evil. The international trials were the first time that leaders of a nation that took the world to war were put on trial for crimes against humanity and against the peace of the world. This ground-breaking tribunal presented to the world evidence of Nazi evil and atrocities, and held the still-living architects of the Holocaust to account.
NUREMBERG presents the events the led to the creation of that international tribunal, an effort led by U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson (the excellent Michael Shannon), but particularly focuses on the Nazis’ second-in-command, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), and his interactions with the American Army psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), assigned to evaluate the Nazi prisoners for fitness to stand trial.
The drama’s other track focuses on U. S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, who resisted Congress’s and others’ push for summary executions of the remaining Nazi regime and instead pushed for international war-crime trials, despite the lack of any precedent for them. Jackson hoped to establish the ascendancy of the rule-of-law over Nazi lawlessness, and to show to the world evidence of the Nazis’ war crimes and the Holocaust.
The film opens on the last day of WWII, in May 1945, with Russell Crowe’s Hermann Goering in a fancy touring car, driving up to some American soldiers on a crowded dirt road and surrendering, before asking them to get his luggage, in a perfect tip-off of his ego. Although Rami Malek’s Dr. Kelley is brought in to assess all the Nazi prisoners for fitness to stand trial, he also has personal ambitions to write a book about Goering and especially focused on trying to “psychologically define evil.” As the days unfold, Kelley slowly develops a complex relationship with his narcissistic yet charming subject.
Based partly on the book “The Nazi And The Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, and written for the screen by the film’s director, James Vanderbilt, NUREMBERG is a powerful, classical-made historical drama that it strikingly timely. Director Vanderbilt uses the complicated relationship between cunning Nazi Goering and determine shrink Dr. Kelley, building a cat-and-mouse game between them that adds a psychological thriller aspect to the film. While the first part plays out much like a psychology drama/thriller, not just the cat-and-mouse between Nazi and psychiatrist but Justice Jackson’s maneuvering to get the international tribunal he believes is the best way to ultimately defeat Nazi evil and keep it from re-emerging. That portion is then capped by a riveting courtroom drama, where Goering takes the stand, and evidence of Nazi crimes are laid bare before the court, and the whole world.
Russell Crowe and Rami Malek give Oscar-worthy performances, among their careers’ best, but also lead a sterling cast the includes not only the always-excellent Michael Shannon as the Supreme Court justice. Richard K. Grant plays the British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe in this international effort, in this international effort, and Leo Woodall is Sgt. Howie Triest, the German-speaking American soldier translator for Kelley, someone with his own heartbreaking backstory. Colin Hanks plays Dr. Gustave Gilbert, another psychologist brought later to reassess Kelley’s work, and John Slattery is Col. Burton Andrus, who runs the Nuremberg prison where Nazis are held whose major job is to keep them alive so they can be executed after they are tried.
As preparations are made for the unprecedented war trials, Dr. Kelley engages in a cat-and-mouse discussions with Goering, as he also evaluates other Nazi leaders’ fitness for trial, and tries to keep them that way before the trial. Suicide is a concern, as the Allies want them to stay alive for execution.
Unlike previous films about the Nuremberg trials, this gripping drama gets to the courtroom portion later in the film, but it is the most powerful, emotional and timely portion, as the prosecutors present their case for the rule-of-law and Goering is put on the stand. Crowe’s Goering on the stand offers some of the film’s most compelling and timely moments, as Goering gives details on how the Nazis took power, their goals, and their rationalizations for what they did, with an echo of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”
However, audiences should be aware that this gripping portion of the film also includes archival footage of concentration camps and death camps taken as Allied troops liberated those camps. That archival footage may be familiar to some yet it remains visceral and hard to watch. While the footage is needed to make its powerful point about Nazi horrors, some might want to look away from the screen at those moments.
NUREMBERG will be called an Oscar-bait drama by some, and it is, but it is Oscar-bait with a higher purpose, to revisit a time when the world held evil to account, and as a reminder, once again, what we all should remember: never again.
NUREMBERG opens Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, in theaters.
RATING: 4 out of 4 stars
