Nuremberg (2025)

Nuremberg arrives as a handsomely mounted historical drama of a type the studios once produced with regularity: the autumn prestige picture, calibrated for adult audiences and awards-season consideration. James Vanderbilt directs with a straight back, following psychiatrist Douglas Kelley as he evaluates Hermann Göring and the other prisoners ahead of the tribunal. Russell Crowe chews the scenery with imperial calm. Rami Malek plays Kelley as a man slowly realizing he has brought a notebook to a moral abyss. The film wants to educate and to move. It manages the first and mostly the second.

The cultural weather inside the film is temperate. The cast is white and male because the historical record is white and male; no modern hand has rearranged the guest list. Female characters drift at the edges of the frame. There is no romance between women, no ecological sermon, no indictment of markets. Kelley's scheme to publish a tell-all is treated as private vanity, not as evidence of a broken economic order. Bodies remain bodies, and the psychiatric examinations are forensic instruments instead of invitations to celebrate neural variety. The moment that lands hardest, the interpreter Howard Triest revealing that his parents were murdered in 1942, functions as testimony about atrocity. That is a different thing from a lesson about the present.

Where the film leans forward, it leans toward an older sermon: accountability, complicity, the smallness of a man who insists he never knew. This is earnest, occasionally heavy-handed instruction, the sort that predates the current vocabulary and never reaches for it. We are told that evil must be answered. We are not told which living institutions deserve the blame, and the film seems content to let the audience draw its own conclusions about the century that followed. A well-tailored garment from an earlier season, still wearable, still flattering to the wearer. The temperature, by current standards, is cool.