The New Nuremberg Film and Hollywood’s Selective Memory

Hollywood keeps returning to 1945 as if it were the only year that ever mattered. In a moment thick with active wars and human rights violations documented across several regions, the industry has again reached for Nuremberg, the trials in which the Nazi leadership was made to answer, in open court, for crimes committed against Jews and others. The new film, titled simply Nuremberg, casts Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, once second-in-command of the Nazi regime, and Rami Malek as the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spends the film trying to understand what made a man like Göring capable of what he did. Reception out of the festival circuit has been solid rather than sensational, with most of the praise landing on Crowe. The more interesting question is not whether the film earns its reviews. It is why Hollywood keeps telling this exact story, and why now, of all moments.

Directed by James Vanderbilt, the film centers less on the courtroom than on the psychology of the men inside it — an American doctor working to understand a Nazi prisoner who turns out to be disturbingly articulate and, in his own way, charming. Crowe leans into that charm without softening the horror underneath it, and Malek brings a careful, watchful energy to a role that is mostly reaction. Even admirers of the performances have noted that the film moves slowly and does not push much past ground that has already been covered elsewhere, with dialogue that sometimes feels built for a trailer more than for a genuine reckoning with how ordinary men come to do monstrous things.

Whose History Gets the Full Production

The larger issue is not the film’s craft, though. It is the pattern it belongs to. Hollywood has made dozens of films about the Holocaust and its aftermath, from Schindler’s List to the earlier Judgment at Nuremberg, and the message across nearly all of them lands the same way: unambiguous condemnation of Nazism, awards-caliber performances, and the moral clarity that comes from judging a horror that ended eight decades ago and has no living defenders left to argue back. None of that makes the history less real or less worth telling. But it raises an obvious question about what other suffering never receives this kind of treatment.

Conflicts and humanitarian crises still unfolding in the present rarely get anything close to this level of craft or this kind of unhurried moral attention from a major studio. That gap is not really about the facts of any single event. It is about which histories are safe enough, settled enough, and distant enough for Hollywood to turn into prestige cinema without controversy landing on the studio itself. A film like Nuremberg is not wrong to exist. But the industry’s selective memory says as much about the present as any court transcript says about 1945.

The Kelley thread carries a real historical weight the film doesn’t have to invent. The actual Douglas Kelley spent months administering psychological tests, including Rorschach inkblots, to the Nuremberg defendants, searching for some diagnosable trait that would explain their capacity for mass atrocity and finding, unsettlingly, mostly ordinary results. He never located the monstrous personality profile he went looking for, and years later, in 1958, he took his own life in front of his family — in a strange, well-documented echo of Göring’s own suicide by smuggled poison the night before his scheduled execution. That detail alone complicates the tidy moral arc a lesser film might have settled for, since it suggests studying evil up close doesn’t necessarily immunize the person doing the studying.

There’s a fair case for revisiting this material anyway, one the film’s defenders would reasonably make. The Nuremberg trials didn’t just punish specific men; they built the legal scaffolding — the very category of “crimes against humanity,” the idea that following orders isn’t a defense, the model of an international tribunal — that later tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and eventually the International Criminal Court, all drew from directly. Telling this story again isn’t purely comfortable nostalgia. It’s revisiting the one moment the world actually built a working structure for accountability, at a time when applying that same structure to ongoing atrocities keeps proving so much harder in practice.

Which makes the selective memory less a matter of Hollywood being lazy and more a matter of what’s actually available to dramatize. A finished trial with a verdict and a scaffolding of law behind it gives a screenwriter a shape to work with. An unresolved, ongoing crisis offers no such shape, no ending, no tribunal, often no verdict at all — and a studio reluctant to make a film with an unresolved moral center will keep reaching for 1945, not necessarily because it’s the safest villain, but because it’s the rare atrocity that came with an actual ending attached.