{"id":284165,"date":"2025-11-14T14:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T14:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/284165\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T14:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T14:49:09","slug":"nuremberg-review-well-paced-expertly-performed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/284165\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuremberg Review \u2014 ‘Well-paced, expertly performed’"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of World War II, US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is tasked with evaluating the mental health of Nazi commanders, including second-in-command Hermann G\u00f6ring (Russell Crowe), ahead of the Nuremberg Trials \u2014 the first time that individuals could be held accountable for war crimes.\u202f<\/p>\n

At just under 150 minutes, James Vanderbilt\u2019s\u00a0Nuremberg \u2014\u202fdetailing the historic war trials for the surviving Nazis of World War II\u202f\u2014\u00a0moves along at an impressive clip. The meat of the film, the psychological face-offs between US military psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) and unrepentant Nazi second-in-command Hermann G\u00f6ring (Russell Crowe), is deeply compelling. G\u00f6ring is intimidating both physically (particularly in the way he fills the frame) and mentally; Crowe\u2019s carefully calculated combination of righteousness, fury and narcissism makes for an especially complex and frightening performance. He presents a fascinating\u00a0ethical\u00a0quandary for Kelley, who\u00a0seems to get\u00a0worryingly close to G\u00f6ring after hundreds of hours together. The t\u00eate-a-t\u00eate between G\u00f6ring and Kelley delivers an enthralling moral\u00a0dilemma\u00a0in its reminder that the people who committed these atrocities\u00a0were human beings.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Though\u00a0Nuremberg\u00a0has a surprising sense of\u00a0humour, including several amusing smash-cuts, Vanderbilt is careful to give the weighty material the respect and space it deserves.\u00a0That\u2019sparticularly\u00a0evident\u00a0in the film\u2019s most harrowing scene: when the horrifying footage of the Holocaust is shown in the trial for the first time, Vanderbilt approaches the moment with utmost seriousness, cutting between the newsreel and people\u2019s devastated reactions to it.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0a crucial scene and the linchpin of\u00a0Nuremberg, and Vanderbilt\u2019s careful, considerate direction makes it deeply moving.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, that balance between creating entertainment and delivering its message are at odds,\u00a0as\u00a0when a crucial showdown between prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and G\u00f6ring is deflated by one too many glib asides.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0a frustrating niggle \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0already a powerful moment without other characters reminding us how important it is \u2014 but mostly,\u00a0Nuremberg\u00a0delivers its message to\u00a0great effect. The cast\u00a0is uniformly\u00a0impressive.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0Leo Woodall, as translator Howie Triest, who walks away with the film, delivering a shattering monologue that\u00a0won\u2019t\u00a0leave a dry eye in the house.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0the first, nor the best film\u00a0about the Nuremberg Trials (that\u2019d\u00a0be Stanley Kramer\u2019s tremendous\u00a0Judgment\u00a0At\u00a0Nuremberg,\u00a0from 1961). But it tackles familiar material with an intriguing new angle as it investigates the psychological elements of this moment in\u00a0history, and\u00a0is a worthy addition to the canon of films about one of the world\u2019s greatest tragedies.<\/p>\n

Well-paced, expertly performed, and an urgent call to stand up to fascism, Nuremberg is a powerful, sweeping story of the attempt to bring an unthinkable evil to justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the end of World War II, US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is tasked with evaluating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-284165","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}