Nuremberg restages justice as heritage cinema—grand sets, solemn tones, clever repartee—yet in doing so, it reveals the deepest irony of accountability: law as theatre for a heritage conscience, hollow where it should confront.
“The indeterminacy of legal argument means that international law is less a set of determinate rules than a practice of presenting claims as though they were law.”
— Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, rev. Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60.
James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg arrives in full Hollywood regalia—swelling score, courtroom spectacle, America once more cast as custodian of justice. It is the Hollywoodization of memory, where war crimes are recast as national self-portraiture. Precisely a decade earlier, Marcel Ophuls’s restored The Memory of Justice (1976) resurfaced at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), still haunted by Vietnam. Vanderbilt has Gaza in plain sight, yet his film cannot speak its name. The difference is stark: Ophuls unsettled by demanding universality, Vanderbilt consoling by sealing the past. Ophuls’s sprawling epic, long elusive in America, remains the reminder of how fragile, and how necessary, uncomfortable memory is.
Cinema has always stumbled when confronted with genocide. From the very beginnings of postwar film culture, directors have strained against the same question: how do you represent an event whose enormity resists narrative? The Holocaust is both over-represented in the endless recycling of atrocity footage and under-represented in that no narrative can ever encompass six million deaths. Stanley Kubrick’s caustic dismissal of Schindler’s List, attributed by screenwriter Frederic Raphael and disputed by others, quotes him saying, “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed; Schindler’s List is about the 600 who don’t.” The remark remains seared into film history because it exposes a paradox: genocide shrinks when rerouted through anecdote, uplift, or individual heroism, crystallising cinema’s temptation to reduce genocide to survival and atrocity to anecdote.
Premiered at TIFF on September 7, 2025, James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg reopens a dilemma it seems barely aware of. Written, directed, and co-produced by Vanderbilt, and based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (2013), the film boasts the trappings of prestige: Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, Rami Malek as U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, Michael Shannon as Justice Robert H. Jackson, Richard E. Grant as Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe. Around them, a polished ensemble including Leo Woodall, John Slattery, Colin Hanks, and Wrenn Schmidt populate a production designed to look like seriousness, scored to swelling orchestration, lit in glossy chiaroscuro, cut with the rhythm of awards-season heritage drama.
And yet what emerges is something quite different: a retro courtroom spectacle that aestheticises atrocity into repartee. The Holocaust becomes a backdrop for clever dialogue. Justice is staged not as a fragile experiment but as entertainment. The bitter irony is its historical moment. Nuremberg arrives in 2025, the very year the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has delivered its most damning interim findings against Israel, and the West has responded not with accountability but with equivocation, military aid, and vetoes at the UN. If the Nuremberg tribunal once symbolised the birth of international law, today’s Gaza hearings at the ICJ expose its collapse. Watching Vanderbilt’s film, one cannot avoid the echo: justice as theatre then, theatre without justice now.
Old Hollywood in New Clothes
Vanderbilt announces his aesthetic immediately. The opening montage is choreographed like a studio epic: American soldiers relieve themselves on a swastika daubed across a wrecked truck, onscreen titles solemnly remind us of seventy million dead, migrants trudge across a bombed landscape, and into frame rolls a limousine bearing Göring, surrendering on his own terms, demanding that his luggage be carried.
The sequence has all the trappings of satire but none of its bite. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski frames Göring in wide, low-angle shots, Crowe portly, immovable, a figure both grotesque and weirdly comic. Yet the editing rhythm—cutting on punchlines, alternating between swagger and reaction shots—undercuts gravitas. It is filmed less like Visconti or Resnais, directors who let atrocity weigh on the frame, and more like a Mankiewicz drama of witty adversaries.
Crowe leans into this tonal instability, playing Göring as a sly narcissist, a man who revels in his own grotesquery. Malek’s Kelley, by contrast, is introduced through parlour tricks: close-ups of deft hands, a lingering shot on a woman charmed by his card games. Kelley’s psychology is staged not as intellectual labour but as a performance of cleverness. The contrast could have exposed the danger of narcissism meeting narcissism; instead, Vanderbilt edits for repartee, building rhythm like an Aaron Sorkin script. Every exchange is sculpted as a quip, every retort as an applause line.
This tonal choice, stylising genocide into watchable dialogue, already gives the game away. Where Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest built horror by refusing to leave the domestic frame of the perpetrators, forcing audiences to live inside banality, Vanderbilt insists on entertainment. The Holocaust is rendered cinematic through wit, not terror.
Kelley’s Book and the Warnings Ignored
History offered Vanderbilt the chance to break from this. Kelley’s 22 Cells in Nuremberg (1947) did not romanticise his encounters with Nazi leaders. It diagnosed fascism as a psychological current embedded in Western society. Fredric Wertham, reviewing the book, is often credited with the chilling line: “There is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.” The phrase has already become shorthand, repeated in festival coverage of the film, though the original review has not yet been traced in the archives. Whether Wertham wrote those exact words or not, the sentiment matches his larger warnings: fascism was not an alien aberration but a possibility lurking in America itself.
Here is where cinema could have intersected with politics in the most searing way. Wertham’s warning, written as Nuremberg unfolded, foreshadowed precisely the crises of legitimacy that now haunt international law. Vanderbilt gestures toward this once, allowing Göring to proclaim that Hitler “made us feel German again,” but the line is tossed into a flurry of repartee and then abandoned. No effort is made to connect Göring’s narcissism to contemporary chauvinisms, from Trump’s rallies to Netanyahu’s “defence” of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
The editing mirrors the political failure: narrative cuts away at the very moment where continuity might be drawn. Instead of dwelling on Kelley’s notes or Wertham’s prescience, the camera cuts to another exchange, another clever line. Banter substitutes for reckoning.
Justice on Screen, Justice in Ruins
The film’s most jarring moment comes when Vanderbilt inserts real atrocity footage: liberation reels of concentration camps, skeletal bodies, emaciated survivors, corpses in piles. Unlike the rest of the film, these are presented without stylisation, documentary images spliced directly into glossy heritage cinema.
The result is devastating, but not in the way Vanderbilt intends. The archival material does not deepen his film; it annihilates it. The contrast between authentic footage and the Sorkin-like courtroom repartee exposes the artificiality of everything around it. The glossy score recedes, the actors’ charisma collapses, the heritage sets suddenly feel like plywood. The audience jolts not into horror but into awareness of cinema’s artifice.
Here, film technique echoes politics. Just as the ICJ has screened testimony, affidavits, satellite images, and famine data from Gaza, placing them on record, the West has treated them as footage without consequence. Authenticity is acknowledged, then bracketed. The ICJ’s interim ruling in January 2025 found a plausible risk of genocide in Israel’s campaign; Washington, London, and Ottawa responded by reaffirming Israel’s “right to self-defence.” The footage exists, the law exists, but both are absorbed into spectacle. Vanderbilt’s archival insertion, meant as gravitas, mirrors this logic precisely: atrocity shown, then neutralised by the narrative frame.
Heritage Cinema for a Heritage Conscience
The courtroom scenes reveal Vanderbilt’s deepest allegiance, not to history but to Hollywood. Jackson, the eloquent prosecutor of record, is staged as a man who falters. Shannon plays him with conviction, but the script reduces him to rhetorical fumbling. The climax belongs instead to Richard E. Grant’s Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, who delivers a Hollywood-style cross-examination, asking Göring if he would still swear loyalty to Hitler after seeing the camp footage. Göring replies that he would—cue narrative closure: the villain damned by his own words, the tribunal vindicated.
The editing rhythm here is pure courtroom melodrama. Close-ups alternate between prosecutor and defendant, cutting on emphasis, building toward the climactic line. The score swells, the lighting sharpens, the camera isolates Göring in the frame. It is a sequence built not for complexity but for catharsis.
Yet the real Nuremberg trials were the opposite of catharsis. They were fragile, contested, and compromised. Charges of “crimes against humanity” were unprecedented; proving them required inventing jurisprudence mid-trial. Geopolitics shaped verdicts as much as law: Soviet prosecutors insisted on equating Katyn Forest with Nazi crimes, Americans refused to touch Hiroshima. The tribunal was both law and theatre. Vanderbilt keeps the theatre, strips away the law, and offers a courtroom morality play.
The resonance with the ICJ is unavoidable. The hearings on Gaza are fragile, contested, and compromised. Israel refuses jurisdiction; the United States dismisses findings as biased; Britain abstains when sanctions are raised. Law is invoked but evacuated, reduced to a stage for statements. What the ICJ reveals in real time—the fragility of law in the face of power—Vanderbilt repackages as retro spectacle.
Vanderbilt has insisted in interviews that his point was to show Nazis as human beings. Yet his whole conception of Göring betrays this. Crowe dominates the screen, framed in commanding close-ups, given long takes, and afforded more presence than any prosecutor. He is magnetic, charismatic, impossible to ignore. Malek’s Kelley flounders by comparison, shot more often in medium frames, his body language hesitant.
The film thus contradicts its own thesis. Göring is not demystified but re-mythologised as larger than life. Evil becomes magnetic, irresistible to the camera. The absolute banality of bureaucracy—the clerks, stenographers, and paperwork through which genocide is enabled—barely registers.
Kubrick’s barb returns: the problem is not that cinema narrows atrocity, but that it aestheticises it into comfort. Nuremberg wants us unsettled. It leaves us entertained.
Gaza and the Collapse of Moral Authority
Marcel Ophuls’s The Memory of Justice asked the question Vanderbilt refuses: can Nuremberg bind us all—or only the defeated?
This failure is not merely cinematic. It is political. Nuremberg arrives in the very year the ICJ has confirmed what human rights groups, UN rapporteurs, and Palestinians have said for months: that Israel’s campaign in Gaza risks annihilating a people. The hearings in The Hague in January and May 2025 documented starvation, indiscriminate bombardment, and the systematic targeting of civilians. South Africa’s case invoked the Genocide Convention, the same instrument drafted in the shadow of Nuremberg. The ICJ ruled the case plausible, ordered provisional measures, and yet the war continued.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—heirs to Jackson, Maxwell-Fyfe, and the Allied stagecraft of 1945—responded not with enforcement but with obstruction. They vetoed ceasefire resolutions at the Security Council, supplied arms, and punished critics at home. The liberal order that once staged justice at Nuremberg now performs complicity at The Hague.
To watch Vanderbilt’s film in this context is therefore unbearable. Its polished surfaces, heritage solemnity, and refusal of risk testify to the collapse of moral authority it unwittingly stages. Justice once performed as theatre is now theatre without justice.
And so we are left with a paradox. Nuremberg is eminently watchable. Crowe brings charisma, Shannon thunders, and Malek gamely attempts insecurity. The sets are stately, the lighting painterly, the score suitably solemn. The editing is sharp enough to keep an audience entertained, the dialogue crafted for festival applause. It is a prestige cinema, a heritage cinema, a cinema for a conscience that wants reassurance rather than confrontation.
But it is never dangerous. It never risks discomfort. It never confronts continuity between past atrocities and present violence. It delivers justice as repartee, law as theatre, atrocity as heritage entertainment.
That is the true verdict, not on Göring or on Kelley, but on us.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
