James Vanderbilt’s ‘Nuremberg’ arrives with the weight of history and the urgency of the present, and its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival proved why it has already become one of the year’s most closely watched films. The four-minute standing ovation may not seem long by Venice standards, but at TIFF, which is a festival where ovations are hard-earned, it clearly signals a rare and genuine moment of collective recognition.
At first glance, Nuremberg looks like another historical courtroom drama. After all, Stanley Kramer’s ‘Judgment at Nuremberg‘ (1961) remains a landmark in cinema to this date. But Vanderbilt’s take is adapted from Jack El-Hai’s ‘The Nazi’ and the ‘Psychiatrist,’ which doesn’t retread on old ground. Instead, it pulls audiences inside the psychological duels that shaped the world’s first international tribunal. By centering the relationship between Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and U.S. Army psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the film becomes less a courtroom spectacle and more an unnerving meditation on justice, charisma, and the ease with which evil can mask itself in charm.
Russell Crowe and Rami Malek’s Deadly Chess Game
Russell Crowe delivers his most commanding work in years as Göring. Slipping into German dialogue with unnerving precision, Crowe captures both confidence and the monstrous denial of Hitler’s right-hand man. His performance doesn’t caricature evil as it complicates it, forcing us to face the chilling truth that brutality often hides behind eloquence and sophistication.
Rami Malek played the character for Kelley, matching him note for note. His portrayal of a man obsessed with probing Göring’s mind who is struggling to reconcile professional detachment with moral horror becomes the audience’s emotional entry point. Their exchanges are a mixture of sparring, psychological probing, and veiled admiration that feel less like scripted dialogue and more like a dangerous duel of ideologies. Malek himself called Kelley a classic obsessive, and that tension, between the duty and fascination, is what keeps the film’s core electrifying.
Amid these heavyweight performances, Leo Woodall emerges as the film’s secret weapon. Playing Sgt. Howie Treist, who is a German-Jewish émigré serving as a translator and carrying a quiet but devastating power. His late-film monologue, where he recalls personal loss at the hands of the regime now on trial, is among the film’s most affecting moments, which is an understated gut punch that brought TIFF audiences to their knees.
A Timely Awards Contender With Lasting Relevance
Eighty years after the Nuremberg trials, the film arrives at a time when authoritarianism is again on the rise, and the lessons of the past risk fading into the background. Vanderbilt doesn’t allow that to happen. In one of the film’s boldest choices, he halts the drama entirely to show unflinching archival footage of concentration camp atrocities. Projected in silence, it’s a sequence that silences the theater and cuts through decades of historical distance. It’s not just history, it’s a warning for us.
As critic Pete Hammond noted, the parallels to today are chilling. Democracies wrestle with fragility, propaganda spreads faster than ever, and the question of whether justice can hold power accountable remains unresolved. In that way, Nuremberg becomes more than a period piece because it’s a mirror for today’s reality.
The film’s craft bolsters its emotional heft. Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography makes the tribunal chambers feel both claustrophobic and monumental, while production design immerses audiences in the immediacy of 1945. Vanderbilt’s script refuses a conventional three-act structure, choosing instead to focus tightly on the Kelley-Göring dynamic, which creates both intimacy and unease.
And the performances don’t stand alone. Michael Shannon’s turn as Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson adds gravitas, Richard E. Grant sharpens the British perspective, and John Slattery gives bite as prison commandant Burton Andrus. It’s an ensemble that feels lived-in rather than ornamental.
Sony Pictures Classics now faces the ultimate task of carrying Nuremberg into the awards race, and the film has the ingredients because it is a major comeback performance from Crowe, including a strong supporting cast, meticulous craft, and themes that resonate painfully with today’s fractured world. In an Oscar season that already includes ‘Oppenheimer’ historical sweep and ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ courtroom intensity in recent memory, Nuremberg could well emerge as a dark horse for Best Picture.
But beyond trophies, its deeper value lies in reviving the conversation about justice, and about its fragility, its imperfections, and its absolute necessity. As the film reminds us, the Nuremberg tribunal wasn’t inevitable. It was a long shot that demanded vision, courage, and compromise. That it succeeded at all is extraordinary.
