Rami Malek (left) and Russell Crowe in a scene from “Nuremberg” (Sony Pictures Classics)

The Nuremberg trials have long drawn filmmakers, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 classic to a 2000 TV miniseries. Writer-director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg takes a different tack, focusing on U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), assigned to evaluate captured Nazi leaders and keep them alive for trial. Kelley hoped to write a bestselling book about the men behind history’s darkest crimes — a goal that blurs the lines between curiosity, ego, and morality.

Much of the film orbits around his tense, layered exchanges with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), the highest-ranking official still living. Their evolving rapport — part duel, part uneasy friendship — explores disturbing ethical terrain. Vanderbilt, best known for writing Zodiac, leans into the psychological cat-and-mouse, probing questions about power, guilt, and the victors’ justice. Yet the film struggles to fuse its stately historical style with its moral complexity.

Crowe, alternating between English and German, gives one of his strongest performances in years — charming, monstrous, and utterly self-assured. The film is less sure-footed in how it depicts his crimes and family life. Malek’s Kelley, meanwhile, is portrayed as a brittle, overconfident opportunist whose ambition clouds his conscience. Still, it’s hard to fully root for him.

The conversations between the two men should be electric, but they often lack spark. Instead of a descent into evil’s psychology, the dialogue circles around fathers, greatness, and even magic tricks. To broaden the frame, Vanderbilt adds the larger machinery of the trials, led by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (a commanding Michael Shannon), as he builds the historic case against the Nazi hierarchy.

With an ensemble cast — Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Colin Hanks, and Leo Woodall among them — Nuremberg expands into a familiar prestige drama. The pacing is deliberate, the tone stately, the cinematography classical — all hallmarks of what once would have been called “Oscar bait.” Woodall’s Sgt. Howie Triest, a German Jewish émigré, delivers the film’s emotional pivot, revealing his past to push Kelley toward redemption.

The courtroom scenes, however, fall back on clichés: stirring speeches, swelling music, and a hollow “we got him” moment that contradicts the film’s darker premise — that justice, here, feels more ritual than revelation. Ultimately, the film’s most haunting sequence comes from real history: archival footage of concentration camps shown in court. It’s a brutal reminder of why these trials mattered, and perhaps why dramatizing them will always pale next to the reality.

Kelley would later publish 22 Cells in Nuremberg, concluding that the men he studied weren’t monsters but disturbingly normal — and that America was not immune to similar moral decay. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.”

[Abridged]

LINDSEY BAHR, MDT/AP Film Writer

“Nuremberg,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “the Holocaust, some language, violent content, smoking, brief drug content, some disturbing images, suicide.” 148 minutes.