There have been many great movies about war that have depicted the battles and the death and the horrors of it, but the new movie Nuremberg explores what happens next. Or, I should say what happened next, as the historical drama is set just after World War II, ahead of the real trials of 22 surviving leaders of Nazi Germany. Critics have seen the film ahead of its November 7 release on the 2025 movie calendar, and they’re calling it “an old-school Oscar movie.”
Rami Malek stars as Douglas Kelley, the chief psychiatrist in charge of determining if the German prisoners are competent to stand trial, who enters a battle of wits against Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Adolf Hitler’s right hand man. In CinemaBlend’s review of Nuremberg, Hugh Scott writes that while the second half of the movie carries the weight that it should, the first half is full of snappy jokes and one-liners that feel entirely out of place. He gives the movie 2 stars out of 5, writing:
It’s impossible to make a man like Hermann Göring sympathetic, and it's probably not a great idea to try to, but Crowe does find a twisted sense of humanity in him. Unfortunately, the rest of the film doesn’t take itself seriously enough to make it stick.
Brian Truitt of USA TODAY gives it 3.5 out of 4 stars, writing that Malek and Crowe will be battling for awards for their performances in a movie that is definitely rousing but lighter than you might expect, given the subject matter. He continues:
The historical drama Nuremberg has more in common with A Few Good Men than Schindler’s List as it deals with the Nazi high command who perpetrated the Holocaust seeing their day in court. It’s also the definition of an Oscar-loving cinephile’s dream movie. An all-star period effort that leans entertaining, though gets deadly serious exactly when it needs to, the film hinges on the matching of wits between Rami Malek as an Army psychiatrist and Russell Crowe as one of the most evil men in the world.
Matthew Jackson of AV Club says there’s nothing subtle about James Vanderbilt’s movie, which urgently and earnestly screams its warning that history repeats itself. Jackson grades it a B, writing:
Nuremberg is at its best—and its best is pretty damn compelling—when it is a story that should not need to be told again, and one that’s well aware of that fact. It takes too much time, almost 150 minutes, to get there, but Vanderbilt’s film slowly, confidently morphs into something beyond a cautionary tale and more like a klaxon blaring through the cinema. All the exasperation generated by the news, all the frustration of a world in which evil charges forward, is on full display by its end. Vanderbilt’s point is not that it can’t happen again, but that it’s already happening.
Rocco T. Thompson of Slant rates Nuremberg — a book-to-screen adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi And The Psychiatrist — 2.5 out of 4 stars, writing that between James Vanderbilt’s direction and Russell Crowe’s performance, Göring is slippery, seductive and an all-too-human monster, holding a mirror up to our current world. Thompson says:
How does a ‘civilized’ country become a slaughterhouse? And how does a family man become a butcher? Vanderbilt’s clever sleight of hand is humanizing this Nazi so as to allow us to see the folly of history, of how there’s a rush to characterize those who commit atrocities as mustache-twirling villains rather than fallible people susceptible to the influence of bad actors, and thus fail to recognize just how far down the rabbit hole we’ve already tumbled.
Lindsey Bahr of the AP also gives it 2.5 out of 4 stars, saying there’s a spark lacking in the conversations between Rami Malek and Russell Crowe’s characters, and we’re deprived of an unnerving descent into the mind of Hitler’s second-in-command. According to Bahr:
The film centers on a series of conversations between Kelley and Goering, who develop something almost like a friendship — or at least a temporary understanding. It’s interesting, morally murky territory fitting of the filmmaker best known as the screenwriter of Zodiac that does gesture toward some provocative ideas — including the very concept of war tribunals overseen by the victors. But it can’t quite synthesize its classical form with the bleak, sobering truths at its core.
Owen Gleiberman of Variety writes that what the movie’s psychiatrist and the audience want is to explore the nature of evil through the eyes of Russell Crowe’s Göring. However, according to the critic, Nuremberg doesn’t quite get to the man behind the evil myth. Gleiberman says in his review:
The film is two-and-a-half hours long, and it’s very much an old-school Oscar movie, full of stately studio staging (the bombed-out ruins, the creamy dark-toned courtroom, the name actors playing crucial figures from history). Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, who has a rather eclectic resume (his most prominent credits are writing the screenplays for Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man), it feels like the most prestigious Hollywood WWII drama of 1988.
The film has a mostly positive 72% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is one of several highly anticipated films that will have us heading to the theater multiple weeks in a row. If you want to see one of the films that, according to some critics, we may see again on Oscar ballots, Nuremberg will be in theaters starting Friday, November 7.
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