While James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg (2025) is not a remake of 1961's well-regarded Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), it is substantially similar in its posture, concerns, and material. It is noteworthy, however, that it is based on a different Nuremberg trial.
Stanley Kramer's earlier film actually covered an inferior trial, known as the subsequent Nuremberg trials, one of the 12 American trials conducted after the primary Nuremberg trial. Judgement At Nuremberg also fictionalized its trial--the judges, prosecutors and defendants were based on real people but not real-life figures.
At the very least, Nuremberg (2025) attempts to justify its existence by portraying the first, primary Nuremberg trial and features major historical figures. Unfortunately, that is where its usefulness ends, as it contributes nothing to the established body of Holocaust films, save Nazis bad, Allies good. Yay for that, I guess?
Nuremberg (2025) recounts the creation of the International Military Tribunal in the wake of the Allied victory after World War II and its trial of the most senior Nazi high command. The first act of Nuremberg (2025) is the most compelling as it tracks the machinations and diplomacy required between the winning powers (the U.S., France, the U.K. and Russia) to conduct an international trial of international defendants when no such mechanism or court existed. Michael Shannon as U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson voices these concerns in a gratuitously expository dialogue with his wife.
For a little while, it seems that Nuremberg (2025) has found its reason to exist--a subversive streak, a challenge to its audience, where it would portray the fulsome violation of fairness and due process afforded to the Nazi defendants by the Allies. By some accounts, the tribunal itself had no jurisdiction to try these crimes, the defendants were not given the ability to prepare or bring pertinent defences, the trials were conducted in the language of the winners (English, French & Russian), and the judges and prosecutors were exclusively from the victorious countries.
Even the charges (such as "Crimes against humanity") were novel, invented for the trial, and ex post facto--they retroactively criminalized acts that weren't criminal when enacted--a violation of the United States Constitution. Even many common law protections were not made available to the Nazi criminal defendants.
An inquiry along these lines would make for bracing viewing, not preach to the choir and tell the audiences that the Nazis were monsters, yes, but instead question the morality of the Allied powers. No such courage or gumption is to be found in the filmmaking here, and it proceeds along templatized paths where the heroic allies finally bring the evil Nazis to justice.
In the absence of any novel insight, interest in the second and third acts is primarily provided by Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, the second in command to Hitler and the de facto leader of Nazi Germany after Hitler's suicide. Crowe again demonstrates his superior acting prowess as he engages in a battle of wits with the psychologist sent to evaluate him, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek).
Much was made of the mechanics of language in Judgement At Nuremberg (1961) a trial where everyone speaks in a different language. Here, Howie Triest (Leo Woodall) is employed as translator between Kelley and the German-speaking Göring, but he's summarily dispatched from the film when Göring switches over to Crowe's heavily German-accented English.
Woodall is third-billed after Malek and Crowe and initially seems quite expendable, until he is revealed to be Jewish to establish a modicum of personal stakes in an otherwise abstract conflict of ideas. He nevertheless feels shoe-horned in purely to give voice to some more gratuitous exposition by Vanderbilt's script and to get a young, buzzy actor in there.
Crowe's German accent will likely divide audiences; it makes him an over-the-top and cartoonishly evil Nazi. Though, hopefully, his performance will find approbation, as it is shaded with sly wit, menacing power and the otherness he brings to it--a creature from another civilization that we can scarce comprehend. Even under slabs of make-up and a fat suit, Crowe impresses and, at this stage in his career, shows his commitment to being an exceptional character actor, now that his leading-man days are behind him.
Nuremberg (2025) has the bland competence of historical dramas of old, jumping from city to city, a stately, desaturated color scheme to evoke the past and a flat handsomeness in terms of period detail and costume design. Brian Tyler's old-fashioned score also contributes to the sense of embalmed prestige.
The drama has twists and turns, and a pretence that the trial might reach any other conclusion than the pre-ordained one. A last desperate reach for relevance is offered up in a coda where Malek's psychiatrist pleads that Nazism and fascism can rear their heads anytime. Get it? Get it? Or do you want me to spell it out?
Nuremberg (2025)'s trappings belie the pointlessness of the entire endeavor, which advances nothing of meaning and fails to make a case for its own existence.