Nuremberg review: ‘It all feels too sexy, glamorous even’ ★★★

Rami Malek as psychiatrist Douglas Kelley[Missing Credit]

Kelley is assisted by Woodall’s German-speaking Sergeant Howie Triest, the real-life (as all the leading characters here are) Jewish translator. However, it is the psychological duel between Malek’s Kelley and Crowe’s intriguingly confident (given his circumstances) Göring that forms the spine of the film.

Of the two, the Nazi seems the better adjusted. It is a performance brimful of charisma, arrogance and intelligence and shows there can be a moral void at the heart of outwardly decent men.

Vanderbilt is best known as a producer (including of the horror Scream) rather than a director and here he too often fails to rein in his crowd-pleasing instincts. Still, when the tribunal begins there are glimpses of the film this might have been. Genuine documentary footage is spliced into the action and the tone changes at last when footage from the camps is shown to the court.

This belated but welcome tonal reset is capped by Richard E. Grant as the British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. When he cross-examines Göring we at last see cracks in the Nazi’s confidence.

Yet predictable drama conventions soon return when Kelley, now enraged by the concentration camps footage, confronts Göring in his cell. During the ding dong the German argues civilian deaths by Allied bombers as no better than civilian deaths in German camps. The American counters that cold-blooded cruelty and mass murder are not the same.

The scene is one of many that stretch credulity. And although it is possible to see in the shouting match a rebuttal of the moral equivalency arguments applied to later conflicts including Gaza, one can have no confidence that this misjudged historical drama intended to be that thoughtful.