Hitler’s second in command as a charming family man

Writer-director James Vanderbilt has based his new movie on the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai. Which explains why this 2025 film centers around the relationship that develops between Hermann Goring and Douglas Kelley.

As the psychiatrist Kelley, Rami Malek often sends mixed signals with his facial expression, as he seems to smile at the oddest times.

As the cagey and clever Reichsmarshall Goring, Russell Crowe’s immense girth is a distraction, as one can’t help but wonder how many all-you-can-eat buffets Mr. Crowe must have visited in preparation for the role.

As Assistant Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, Michael Shannon has perfected the art of the blank stare. The knowing stoicism that worked so well for him as President James Garfield in Death by Lightning is not nearly as effective this time out.

Trying to make a mainstream piece of entertainment out of a horrific historical event is never easy, and to its credit Nuremberg does get its solemn point across, despite the reservations noted above. At the close of WWII the surviving members of the Third Reich are summarily rounded up, tried for war crimes by an international tribunal, convicted and executed.

And maybe it’s best to just leave it at that, and look past what I see as casting issues, or dramaturgy issues.

Like the insertion of an attractive female character for psychiatrist Kelley to banter with in a few (meaningless) scenes.

Or allowing Goring to come across for most of the film as just another dedicated military officer and charming family man who claimed what turned out to be death camps were merely work camps.

Or showing Pope Pius XII as being embarrassed by Justice Jackson into agreeing to have the Vatican back the work of the international tribunal.

The film’s big climatic courtroom sequence, in which Richard Grant as the British prosecutor bails out Michael Shannon’s U.S. prosecutor, who is unable to ‘break’ the shrewd Goring on the stand, left me perplexed.

The British prosecutor’s questioning didn’t strike me as being any more pointed than Justice Jackson’s, so I didn’t quite get why Goring eventually fell into the Brit’s ‘trap’ and implicated himself. The intended dramatic climax just wasn’t very climatic to me.

But I do appreciate and respect the earnestness of the overall production, even if I found some of its machinations to be less than convincing.