Nuremberg - The Cost of Remembering

There are films that ask to be watched.And then there are films that demand you sit still and bear witness.

Nuremberg—screened beneath the storied ceiling of the Chinese Theatre at AFI Fest—belongs firmly in the latter category. From the moment the lights dimmed, the room felt hushed in a way that had nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with weight. History has gravity. This film knows it.

Russell Crowe’s Hermann Göring is not a performance designed to comfort. It is designed to unsettle. He plays Göring not as a caricature of evil, but as something far more dangerous: a man still convinced of his own brilliance, his own righteousness, his own entitlement to power—even in captivity. Crowe understands something essential here: monsters rarely believe they are monsters. They believe they are misunderstood men.

Opposite him, Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelley moves through the film like a quiet reckoning. Where Göring fills space, Kelley absorbs it. Their exchanges—measured, psychological, taut—become the true battleground of Nuremberg. Not fists. Not guns. Words. Silence. The slow, terrifying realization that intelligence without conscience is not neutrality—it is complicity waiting for permission.

Director James Vanderbilt approaches the material with reverence, perhaps too much at times. The film is meticulous, deliberate, almost austere. There are moments when the pacing feels heavy, when the story seems to hold itself at arm’s length rather than plunging headlong into the emotional abyss it circles. But perhaps that restraint is intentional. Perhaps this is not a film meant to sweep you away—but to pin you in your seat and force you to look.

The use of archival Holocaust footage lands like a blow to the chest. There is no cinematic buffer here, no stylization to soften the truth. It interrupts the film’s controlled aesthetic in a way that feels necessary, even brutal. You cannot intellectualize genocide. You can only confront it.

Watching Nuremberg in a room full of artists, filmmakers, critics, and storytellers felt particularly charged. We traffic in narrative. We shape memory. And this film asks a hard question: what responsibility does storytelling bear when history itself is on trial?

The applause at the end was not thunderous. It was thoughtful. Measured. The kind of response that says, I need time with this. And maybe that is the film’s greatest success. Nuremberg does not resolve neatly. It lingers. It unsettles. It refuses to let you leave unchanged.

This is not an easy film. It is not a crowd-pleaser. But it is a necessary one.

And sometimes, that matters more.