The trial that never ends.
NUREMBERG is a historical drama wrapped in prestige gloss, but beneath its immaculate surface is a film wrestling with a simple truth: we’ve been here before. The Holocaust has shaped some of cinema’s most devastating work, and any new entry into this terrain arrives with an impossible weight.
James Vanderbilt doesn’t reinvent the genre — the film never pretends to. Instead, it focuses on the aftermath: the courtroom where language, evidence, and sheer human nerve collide with the wreckage of genocide.
What emerges is less a revelation and more a reckoning. A procedural built on familiar ground. A story told countless times, in countless ways, by filmmakers far more radical.
NUREMBERG knows it cannot shock an audience raised on The Pianist, Shoah, and The Zone of Interest. So it doesn’t try. It aims for psychological pressure rather than emotional devastation — and the pressure lands only because of one man.
Russell Crowe is volcanic. He tears into Hermann Göring with the confidence of an actor who knows exactly how terrifying charisma can be. Crowe plays him as a man who refuses to look monstrous — a strategist, a performer, a manipulator who understands how charm can rot from the inside. His Göring is affable until he isn’t, articulate until he turns predatory, cooperative until he’s cornered. It’s the exact sort of performance that makes your stomach knot: not because you haven’t seen evil portrayed before, but because Crowe makes it feel disarmingly alive.
Rami Malek, solid but misaligned, can’t match Crowe’s gravitational pull. Michael Shannon comes closest — brittle, furious, walking through the trial with the thousand-yard stare of someone translating trauma into legal procedure. Their exchanges with Crowe crackle with the frustration of men trying to pin down a figure who slips past morality like smoke.
Stylistically, Vanderbilt plays it safe. The film is polished, measured, even handsome — a courtroom piece with war-crimes gravity but not war-crimes impact. It relies on structure rather than shock, on testimony rather than terror. The emotional brutality exists in transcripts, not in images. The horror is spoken, catalogued, exhibited… but not felt at the marrow level. You watch the cost; you don’t live it.
Yet the familiarity doesn’t sink the film — it merely defines its ceiling.
NUREMBERG is not a shattering experience. It’s not The Pianist or Schindler's List. It is, instead, an act of cinematic accountability: controlled, articulate, unwaveringly focused on the psychology of men who believed themselves untouchable. And Crowe turns that into theater. A duel of words, ego, and denial. A performance so sharp it reframes the entire film around him.
NUREMBERG isn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t visionary. But it is anchored by one of Russell Crowe’s most chilling performances in years — a portrayal that slices through the film’s familiarity and leaves something lingering, unsettling, and horribly human
