Finally, the rotund strutting totalitarian with his plundered millions has surrendered to the authorities, and the trial for his myriad wrongdoings can commence. Punch a Nazi they told us, and literally and figuratively, they don’t come any bigger than this fellow.
Wait, who did you think I was talking about?
It’s likely not a coincidence that Nuremberg, directed and written by James Vanderbilt, whose previous writing credits include a couple of Spider-Man movies and the sequel to Independence Day, began production in 2024. If Biden or Harris had won, Hollywood believed the film’s subtext would have reminded flyover country how close to the abyss we had come. But what if the unthinkable happens and the Bad Orange Man gets in? Well, our film still serves as a warning to the rubes who voted for him. We can’t lose!
Spoilers abound in this review, but the film was originally in theaters during the Christmas holiday season, and this Hermann Göring fellow was a rather well-known chap back in the day. Even those with a casual knowledge of All This and World War II (classical reference) should likely know how his story ends. But if you don’t, and you’d like to see the movie without any spoilers, best stop here.
Based on the 2013 book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, Nuremberg’s framing mechanism is young American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (a frequently bug-eyed Rami Malek) who travels by train to pick Göring’s brains in order to provide research for Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) who is organizing the first of the Nuremberg Trials, with the most powerful surviving officials of the Third Reich in the dock.
Stanley Kramer’s vastly superior 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg was set during later hearings, with the trial of fictitious lesser officials, which meant that we didn’t go into the film knowing what the outcome will be. Unlike this Nuremberg, there’s genuine subtlety in Kramer’s film, as Hollywood insider “George MF Washington” wrote last year in a Substack titled, “Treating the Audience Like Adults:”
Growing into adulthood requires many things of us, and one of those things is that when debating politics or morality, we have a grownup’s obligation to engage with the opposition’s best arguments, rather than the arguments we wish they were making.
Once upon a time, dramatic movies made for adult audiences seemed to understand this rule of growing older and wiser. Filmmakers of the past often challenged their audiences with difficult morally complicated stories that could easily have been made simpler through pure black-and-white political demagoguery. Resisting the temptation to make the lazy demagogic argument, it seems to me, was an indication that Hollywood once trusted its audience in ways that its modern counterpart rarely seems willing to do anymore.
In the world of modern messaging where the most important thing seems to be that audiences come away from a film having learned the appropriate lesson, most movies these days do not leave it to their audience to appreciate nuance, and they certainly don’t trust their audience to make the correct moral judgment when presented with villains who, while they may be wrong or even evil, have a point.
When Farce Turns to Melodrama
Rather than subtlety, nuance, and trusting its audience, 2025’s Nuremberg, at least until about halfway into its run, uses plenty of modern-day irony and humor (occasionally annoyingly slapstick). Given its subject matter, the film is initially surprisingly light, until the rug is pulled out from the audience. The high-ranking Nazis are marched into the dock to begin their eponymously-named trial, and they – and us, the audience – are shown horrific black and white newsreel footage filmed while the concentration camps were being liberated by the Allies.
It’s an attempted shock tactic that falls somewhat flat in the 21st century. Americans have been exposed to newsreel footage of the horrors of the concentration camps since the war’s end in 1945. Hellish shots of the ovens with charred bodies in them were similarly seen midway through Stanley Kramer’s aforementioned Judgement at Nuremberg 65 years ago. The soul-wrenching clip of emaciated bodies being pushed into a mass grave by a bulldozer driver, after the Allies liberated the concentration camps, was a centerpiece of the documentary TV series The World At War’s episode titled “Genocide,” over 50 years ago.
In his review of Nuremberg, Christian Toto rather naively believed that “Nuremberg Should Crush TDS Once and for All,” quite an optimistic ambition for a low-to-medium budget WWII movie:
“Nuremberg” offers a slick, satisfying look at critical trials following the Third Reich’s demise.
Until it doesn’t.
Buried in the middle of this well-packaged drama is shocking footage of the Holocaust’s atrocities. What might seem tonally imbalanced is actually a perfectly deployed smart bomb.
It’s vital to the story in play, while reminding anyone cold enough to compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler that they should be ashamed of themselves.
Does that include the filmmakers? Because just to drive its message home with a sledgehammer, the film ends with a coda, with Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelley back in the states, and promoting his book 22 Cells in Nuremberg by dropping by a talk radio station circa 1947, where the host says to him, “I have to be honest, Dr. Kelley. I find some of the conclusions in your book quite unbelievable. You were dealing with the Nazis, who you must admit are unique people,” to which Kelley replies, “They are not unique people. There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today.”
The host understandably counterpunches, “Not in America:”
Kelley: Yes, in America. Their personality patterns are not obscure. There are people who want to be in power. And while you say they don’t exist here, I would say I’m quite certain there are people in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they knew they could gain control of the other half.
Host: Doctor, please.
Kelley: They stoke hatred. It’s what Hitler and Göring did, and it is textbook. And if you think the next time it happens we’re going to recognize it because they’re wearing scary uniforms, you’re out of your damn mind.
Host: More with our panel when we return.
Host [to Kelley, off mic] They’re not going to invite you to stay for the next segment. Let’s go. And just so you know, trashing our country is probably not the best way to sell your book.
It’s not a great way to sell movie tickets, either. According to Box Office Mojo, Nuremberg only grossed $14.5 million in America, off of a reported budget of $11.8 million, presumably because the film’s metaphor could be spotted a mile away, once you saw the trailer.
Perhaps the filmmakers thought this coda was necessary, just in case audiences missed the subtlety of Russell Crowe playing a large jolly middle-aged Nazi in a film shot in 2024. Still, it actually could have been worse. The 2000 made-for-TV telling of Nuremberg, with Brian Cox as Göring, and Alec Baldwin as Robert H. Jackson, begins with Göring surrendering to a beaming General Carl Spaatz, who smiles when he sees the swastika on the ceremonial dagger Göring gives him, followed by Göring clapping along and beaming while the American Eighth Air Force band enthusiastically plays “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” Not exactly subtle stuff during that election year:
“Who is the Real Enemy?”
In her November review of Russell Crowe’s Nuremberg in the London Spectator titled, “Mrs. Göring is far too sympathetic,” Deborah Ross wrote that the film “serves as a decent enough history lesson. And it’s watchable. The message? That evil is within us all.”
But of course – because Hollywood is capable of no other message these days when it comes to WWII movies. The 2025 movie’s coda recalls an observation by filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd, when he pitched a movie about the Allies’ 1942 massacre at Dieppe, a precursor to the D-Day landings:
[W]hen Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party–as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.
“So I went in,” Chetwynd told me, “and someone there said, ‘So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?’
“And I said, ‘Well, they weren’t bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?’ And she said, ‘Well, who’s the enemy?’ I said, ‘Hitler. The Nazis.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who’s the real enemy?’”
“It was the first time I realized,” Chetwynd continued, “that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They’ve become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people.”
After he was rebuffed by a Hollywood executive who, as Lionel Chetwynd explained that “for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves,” perhaps that executive was simply projecting. Curiously though, a lot of Hollywood superstars approve of thoroughly evil people:
BREAKING: The 2026 Oscars are on high alert after the FBI warned of a potential “surprise attack” from the regime in Iran.
Law enforcement in California has been alerted to threats that could involve drones, sleeper cells or lone actors. pic.twitter.com/ws7kSDnb8j
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) March 12, 2026
Filming of Nuremberg began in February of 2024, just a few months after October 7th, 2023. As Dina Kraft asked at Haaretz in May of 2024: How Do We Tell the Story of the Holocaust After October 7?
“Never Again is Now” has become a slogan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Hamas the “new Nazis.” October 7 is often referred to in Israel as the “deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
* * * * * * * *
About 3,000 Hamas terrorists are believed to have broken through the Gaza border October 7, murdering some 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, men, women and children. Some 365 alone, most of them young people, were slaughtered at a rave party. Sexual assault was used as a tool of torture on some victims.
Apparently, writer-director James Vanderbilt never thought to make the connection that America’s Newspaper of Record did in November of 2023:
Palestine Protester Tries To Argue With Skinhead But They Just Agree On Everything https://t.co/BzoVhjrX30 pic.twitter.com/ptsOC3vCEt
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 12, 2026
Unlike Stanley Kramer’s 1961 attempt, with its stellar cast of powerhouse actors, the performances in Nuremberg are wildly uneven, Adrian Hennigan writes at Haaretz:
While Crowe convinces, the less said about Malek’s performance, the better. I’ve struggled to find him believable in anything he’s been in since “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I really didn’t buy into him as a psychiatrist here. It doesn’t help that his habit of performing card or coin illusions feels fake – even though the real-life Kelley was a skilled practitioner and believed that teaching soldiers how to perform magic tricks could help them overcome trauma.
Then there’s the portrayal of the prosecutors: Shannon’s Jackson is presented as an uninspiring counsel who is saved at the last moment by the surprise intervention of British deputy prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant). Even allowing for the necessity of editing down a months-long tribunal into a handful of pithy scenes, it is a complete fabrication to present things in such a light.
You will also search without success in the tribunal transcripts for Maxwell-Fyfe referring to the Nazis’ killing of filmmakers or the use of the word “Romany” in 1946.
There are other creative choices that are equally hard to understand. For instance, Kelley was eventually assisted at Nuremberg by a Jewish-American psychiatrist, Lt. Gustave Gilbert. He came face to face with Nazis who assured him they could “smell a Jew” but had no inkling about him. That’s completely absent from the movie, with Gilbert played by Colin Hanks. (Perhaps this is because there is one key character whose Jewishness is revealed late on, in another plot twist.)
Is Nuremberg worth your time? There are worse movies of course, and if you have a Netflix account and two and a half hours to kill, sure why not. And that’s the problem. 2025’s Nuremberg dumbs down the conclusion of the darkest years of the 20th century into what the kids these days call “second screen” friendly material. 1961’s Judgement at Nuremberg, made by grownups for grownups (who were only a decade and a half away from WWII’s end) and to be shown in cinemas on the biggest of big screens, does not.
In his November review of the former movie, Armond White concluded, “By contrast, Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) was a timely response to the then-recent revelations of the Eichmann trial. Kramer and screenwriter Abby Mann fictionalized the postwar moral challenge. And the cast of genuine movie stars — playing roles not historical figures — gave spiritual testimony without getting tied up in the kind of ego contest that Vanderbilt fixates on. The result was beautiful and emotionally persuasive, whereas Vanderbilt proves that morality is no longer possible in Hollywood.”
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