Nuremberg fails to prosecute its subject matter.

History is rarely as tidy as the textbooks suggest, yet Nuremberg seems determined to file away the twentieth century’s greatest atrocity with the administrative efficiency of a clerk stamping a docket. Directed by James Vanderbilt, this 2025 adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s non-fiction work, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, arrives – a few years too late or, maybe, a few years too early depending on your remaining faith in western democracy – with a sombre self-seriousness that commands respect but frequently forgets to compel, a film that understands the gravity of its subject – the psychological evaluation of high-ranking Nazi officials before their trials – but mistakes a dour, measured cadence for profundity in the face of an audience increasingly unfamiliar with the idea of fascists facing consequences.

When American psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is brought to Germany to analyse and prepare a group of high-ranking Nazis for trial, he finds his primary subject is the former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) himself. Over the course of the weeks of preparation for the trial, Kelley uses his subjects to explore the nature of evil, in an attempt to identify its psychological source.

Vanderbilt places his characters, and us the audience, in a post-war Europe that is shattered and grey, shooting it with a stark, desaturated palette fitting for the material and for the psychological chess match as Kelley attempts to locate a specific pathology of evil, while Göring attempts to manipulate his captors and reassert his dominance even from a prison cell.

If there is a reason to endure the film’s rigid pacing, it is Russell Crowe: his portrayal of Göring is nothing short of imperious. Crowe avoids the trap of playing a frothing, Machiavellian monster; instead, he imbues the Reichsmarschall with a terrifying, convivial charisma, dominating the frame and shifting effortlessly between a jovial, uncle-like bonhomie and a steely, unrepentant ideologue. When he speaks, the air in the room changes; it’s a performance of immense physical and vocal control, reminding us why Crowe remains a titan of the screen when given material that allows him to chew on something substantial. He never seeks sympathy for Göring, but he demands attention and dares us to confront the uncomfortable idea that Göring’s behaviour wasn’t the absence of humanity but merely a manifestation of his particular strain of it.

Opposite him, Rami Malek delivers another performance of wired, nervous energy. His Kelley, the intellectual foil to Crowe’s brute force of personality, is generally well served by Malek’s tendency towards twitchy idiosyncrasies, even though they occasionally distract from the battle of wits. He plays Kelley as a man increasingly consumed by his proximity to darkness, his scientific detachment eroding as he realises the terrifying normality of the men he studies.

The scenes shared by Crowe and Ramek are where history really comes alive, brief oases of crackling tension that punctuate the otherwise staid and formulaic historical procedural comfort zone the film too often retreats to. It wastes talented actors like Michael Shannon, playing Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson, confining him to delivering dry exposition about legal precedents and tribunal logistics.

The approach is undeniably instructive, yet it constantly risks rendering the horror abstract. By focusing so heavily on the bureaucratic mechanics of the tribunal and the academic theories of Kelley, the visceral reality of the crimes is kept at arm’s length and the film’s discussion of evil is scholarly and remote, an abiding sense that the production is too polite to take risks with such sensitive material.

For a story about the collision of justice and vengeance, the temperature remains surprisingly tepid. Crowe’s towering work here deserves to be remembered, a chilling study of power and ego that outshines the movie containing it. But as a piece of cinema, Nuremberg is a missed opportunity, at the exact moment that Kelley’s findings are coming true.