{"id":21469,"date":"2025-10-26T03:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T03:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/21469\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T03:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T03:54:08","slug":"nuremberg-the-austin-chronicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/21469\/","title":{"rendered":"Nuremberg \u2022 The Austin Chronicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Justice cannot just be done. It must be seen to be done. That\u2019s why it was important that the leaders of the Third Reich were not simply shot as enemies but stood public trial for their monstrous crimes. In Nuremberg, writer\/director James Vanderbilt\u2019s sober and sobering recreation of the first hearings of the International Military Tribunal in 1945, their sins are rightly re-litigated.<\/p>\n

Before the trial, American military psychologist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) has his pick of ranking Nazis to study among the 22 indicted men in the first Nuremberg trial: vile offenders such as Robert Ley (Tom Keune), the overseer of the Reich\u2019s slave labor operations; war criminal and Hitler\u2019s successor Admiral Karl D\u00f6nitz (Peter Jordan); and propagandist-in-chief Julius Streicher (Dieter Riesle). But the real target is Reichsmarschall Hermann G\u00f6ring (Russell Crowe): Hitler\u2019s number two, a war ace, family man, and the toughest nut to crack, as Kelley must prove his knowing involvement in the worst of the Reich\u2019s crimes. That sounds simple, but Crowe\u2019s version of G\u00f6ring is too smart, too consistent, and too adept at presenting himself as a patriot, not a monster.<\/p>\n

In their sessions, Vanderbilt\u2019s script veers close to the cat-and-mouse tropes of the serial killer hunter genre created by The Silence of the Lambs and continued to this day through Mindhunter and No Man of God<\/a>. However, that\u2019s inherent in this perspective on the trial, since he\u2019s adapting The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Jack El-Hai\u2019s examination of the relationship between G\u00f6ring and Kelley.<\/p>\n

However, it\u2019s a battle on two fronts. While Kelley jousts with G\u00f6ring, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) sets in motion the whole idea of an international tribune. The absurdly high stakes are clearly laid out: If they can\u2019t get convictions, the Nazis walk away in triumph. Worse, if the hearings look like a show trial, they become martyrs, and that\u2019s something Jackson cannot afford.<\/p>\n

The full story is too massive to fit into one film, and so just as Stanley Kramer\u2019s 1961 epic Judgment at Nuremberg made simplifications, Vanderbilt\u2019s script tightens up on Kelley\u2019s sparring with G\u00f6ring, and Jackson fighting with the nebulous geopolitical forces at play. But this means some characters go underserved, such as Colin Hanks as Kelley\u2019s rival, psychologist Gustave Gilbert. Worse may be the miscasting of Richard E. Grant as British prosecuting counsel David Maxwell Fyfe: Grant does the best he can, but the story reduces Fyfe to an alcoholic, and little more than Jackson\u2019s clerk. (At least Fyfe gets a mention: You\u2019ll never hear a French or Soviet accent.)<\/p>\n

In simplifying the characters, Vanderbilt seemingly tries to recreate the interwoven dual plots of his earlier look at good men compromising their morals to hunt evil, David Fincher\u2019s Zodiac<\/a>. There are moments at which he comes close. A midnight meeting between the lawyer and the shrink amid the ruins of the Reichsparteitagsgel\u00e4nde \u2013 the 11-acre plaza on which Hitler\u2019s goons paraded and shrieked \u2013 truly captures the world-changing gravity of what both men are trying to achieve.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Nuremberg would be better as two separate films: Every time the G\u00f6ring sessions pick up steam \u2013 mostly through Crowe\u2019s charismatic, affable depiction of the fiend \u2013 some minutiae of the trial intervene. However, Jackson\u2019s side of the story is often underdeveloped, with the complexities of getting all four of the major Allied powers to sign off on the hearings handled at a sprint. The only moment where the scale of the risks he is taking is truly apparent is in a scene where he blackmails Pope Pius XII (Giuseppe Cederna) into supporting the trials.<\/p>\n

But Vanderbilt\u2019s real success is in a magic trick, akin to the sleights-of-hand that amateur prestidigitateur Kelley practices in his off moments. In the actual trial, and in the back-and-forth between Jackson and an increasingly red faced G\u00f6ring on the stand, the illusion of G\u00f6ring\u2019s plausible deniability collapses. If ever there is a reminder that evil must be punished, publicly and with righteousness, it\u2019s in the dark resolution of Nuremberg.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg opens in theatres November 7.<\/p>\n

Nuremberg<\/p>\n

2025, R, 148 mins. Directed by James Vanderbilt. Starring Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant, Colin Hanks, Leo Woodall, John Slattery, Giuseppe Cederna, Tom Keune, Peter Jordan, Dieter Riesle.<\/p>\n

\"YouTube<\/p>\n

\"YouTube<\/p>\n

A note to readers:\u00a0Bold and uncensored,\u00a0The Austin Chronicle\u00a0has been Austin\u2019s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community\u2019s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. Now more than ever, we need your support to continue supplying Austin with independent, free press. If real news is important to you, please consider making a donation of $5, $10 or whatever you can afford, to help keep our journalism on stands. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justice cannot just be done. It must be seen to be done. That\u2019s why it was important that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,15844,134,133,15964,15965,15966,15967],"class_list":["post-21469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-film-festival-2025","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-michael-shannon","tag-movie-reviews","tag-nuremberg","tag-russell-crowe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}