"This war ends in a courtroom."
Russell Crowe delivers one of his best performances as Hitler's second-in-command Hermann Göring in writer-director James Vanderbilt's dramatisation of the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials, when the world watched and listened for justice to be done.
Vanderbilt, who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher's 2007 true crime classic Zodiac, has based his film on the Jack El-Hai book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. It told the true story of Göring's sessions with Lt Colonel Douglas Kelley, the US Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who was the chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison. Here, Crowe's fellow Best Actor Oscar winner Rami Malek plays Kelley, a doctor simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by his patient.
This isn't a remake of 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg; that Oscar winner was a fictionalised account of the trials of German jurists and lawyers in 1947 and did not focus on Göring. But Vanderbilt's film is now a companion piece to the work of his fellow director Stanley Kramer over 60 years ago, and vice versa.
Like Kramer, Vanderbilt devastatingly uses the Holocaust footage that was shown during the actual trials. It is, however, almost 90 minutes into the film before Göring is in the dock. In that courtroom, Michael Shannon is perfectly cast as Robert H Jackson, the associate justice of the US Supreme Court, who was one of the men tasked with prosecuting Göring and his co-defendants. An underused Richard E Grant plays David Maxwell Fyfe, Britain's chief prosecutor.
The first half of Nuremberg could have been tighter (example: there was no need for scenes involving Kelley and a female journalist he meets en route and again in the city) and Malek overdoes it at times, but Crowe's work compensates for such padding and posturing. The second half of the film is excellent, and you'll be making mental notes to check what's on screen against real-life events. It is amazing how much tallies with the history books.
Exposition-heavy to benefit younger generations, Nuremberg is in cinemas now and arrives on Sky in January 2026. It closes with a quote from the English philosopher RG Collingwood that will be new to most of us: "The only clue to what man can do is what man has done."
