‘Nuremberg’: The Film That Could Have Been Great
Written and directed by James Vanderbilt. Starring Rami Malek as Dr Douglas Kelley, Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, Michael Shannon as Justice Robert H. Jackson, Leo Woodall as Sgt Howie Triest, Richard E. Grant as Sir David Maxwell Fyfe.
James Vanderbilt wrote Zodiac. Russell Crowe won an Oscar for Gladiator. Rami Malek won one for Bohemian Rhapsody. The source material, Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, tells the extraordinary true story of an American doctor who spent months interrogating Nazi war criminals, became dangerously entangled with Hermann Göring, and eventually killed himself using the same method as the man he studied. This should have been a contender. Yet, even though it made the BAFTA longlist, Nuremberg didn't get nominated. The question isn't whether the film has merit—it clearly does—but why such promising material doesn't quite deliver.
The screenplay can't quite decide whose story it wants to tell. Dr Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) gets the intimate psychological journey and the tragic ending. Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) gets the courtroom fireworks and the moral victory. Both are compelling, but they compete for attention. Jackson confronts the Pope, battles senators, and delivers stirring speeches about international law. Kelley plays poker with Göring (Russell Crowe), meets his wife and daughter, and descends into obsession. It feels like two different films awkwardly stitched together. The screenplay gives Jackson the spectacle, and Kelley the tragedy, but the character who dies should be the one we care about most throughout.
The moment when Kelley confronts the reality of Nazi evil—watching concentration camp footage, then demanding answers from Göring—arrives roughly two-thirds through the film. This leaves the first half establishing relationships, building the trial, and deepening Kelley's entanglement with Göring's family. All of this is well-rendered. But it means that Kelley's actual reckoning, his shift from ambitious observer to haunted truth-teller, gets compressed into the final third. We see him transformed, but barely witness the transformation happening.
Vanderbilt writes Göring as charming, dangerous, intellectually formidable—a war criminal who controls every room he enters, even from a prison cell. This is dramatically compelling, and Crowe clearly relishes the role. The problem is that Göring becomes so watchable that he overwhelms Kelley's arc. We're more interested in the seducer than the seduced. And when Göring escapes the hangman’s noose through suicide—using a cyanide capsule he'd hidden throughout his imprisonment—it feels like the villain's final victory rather than the hero's tragedy. The antagonist shouldn't be more memorable than the protagonist.
Kelley's ultimate insight—that people who commit atrocities aren't inexplicable aberrations, that complicity can spread through any society—is profound and disturbing. It's also delivered through a radio interview and title cards rather than demonstrated through dramatic action. We're told Kelley spent fifteen years warning people, and that no one would listen. We're told he became increasingly agitated. We're told he committed suicide by cyanide, the same method as Göring. But we don't see any of this. The screenplay's most important revelation—that studying evil corroded Kelley from within—is a coda, not a climax.
Imagine a version where Kelley is the undisputed centre, where we experience the trial through his eyes rather than Jackson's speeches. Where the confrontation with Nazi atrocities comes at the midpoint, giving us a full hour to watch Kelley's post-recognition journey. Where we see the 1947-1961 decline rather than reading about it. Where the final scene is Kelley's suicide, dramatised with the same visceral detail as Göring's. The parallel between doctor and patient shouldn't be a title-card revelation—it should be the structural spine that makes every scene resonate differently on second viewing.
Nuremberg is clearly the work of serious filmmakers grappling with important material. The historical research is meticulous. The Kelley-Göring scenes crackle with intelligence and menace. The warning about how societies can be seduced by authoritarianism matters now more than ever. But a screenplay can have all the right ingredients and still not cohere. The dual protagonist structure dissipates tension. The late turn compresses the transformation. The title-card ending tells us what we should have been shown. What remains is admirable—a film about moral compromise that is itself compromised by structural choices. The talent was there. The material was there. The architecture wasn't.
Film stills from Nuremberg (2025, directed by James Vanderbilt) are copyright of Walden Media/Mythology Entertainment, and are used here for criticism and commentary under fair dealing (UK) and fair use (US) provisions.
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