Review-Essay of the film of 2025 and historical events of 1945-46
by Inna Rogatchi (C)
Disclaimer: I do believe that the newly released epic Nuremberg drama ( 2025) was well intended. We do need the films on the theme today and tomorrow more than even. Thus I am grateful to the team who had conceived and produced the film and I am greeting its release. There are reasons for criticising some of the film’s features and creative decisions, but overall, the more films on the theme will appear, the better. And this is what really matters nowadays.
Commendable Interest
The new Nuremberg film premiered at the Toronto Film festival in early November 2025, and it was released first in the US cinemas a month later, with soon coming international release. The timing of the release was both historically reasoned and professionally calculated. It came to the screens at the time of commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the first, International Nuremberg Tribunal, and professionally-wise, quite conveniently for the Oscar 2026 run. The intent for Oscars is palpable in the large, over two hours, aiming for epic historical film which can not be attested as a drama because it does not produce the one.
Genre-wise, it is a rather featured historical chronicle which in a too-typical Hollywood manner re-tells a very important moment in the modern history, the setting, beginning and the outcome of the first international Nuremberg tribunal back in 1945-1946. The date which actually was not properly commemorated , or maybe not yet. We generally have had a problem with commemoration of all those WWII and Holocaust connected dates throughout 2025 due to the drastically changed atmosphere in the world which now prefers to ignore the facts of the Holocaust and its lessons. It is not ‘fashionable’ any longer. Not prestigious. Simply said, it is not required any longer in the way it was so for the decades.
The global moral doctrine that was developed and was unanimously accepted from 1945 onward, after the world saw the crimes of the Shoah, black on white, for the first time, in the organised public way, at the Nuremberg Tribunal, has become irrelevant today. That unthinkable shift in a public domain has become possible, following an absurd irony, being pushed off-stage of public concern by the crimes committed on October 7th and after it by the terrorist animalistic force. It is like the worst being added to terrible has produced something totally different and unthinkable in human perception, namely acceptance of the crimes, both by Hamas and the Nazis, in one bottle, so to say.
Prior to the October 7th 2023, many, if not all of my senior international colleagues in the field of commemorative education were planning massive events of all sorts for 2025, as it was coming ‘the year of so many commemorations of the history of WWII’, as they have mentioned. We know the rest after the massacre in Israel. The attitude towards it is and will certainly stay as one of the most shameful pages in the history of human society of the XXI century.
That’s why the idea, work and producing such films as Nuremberg by the US-British-German-Polish-Hungarian team to be released at the end of 2025 is a merit of its own, Oscars or not.
How Final was the Final Solution?
What are we aiming at by addressing and re-addressing Holocaust in the cinema? It is a grim – thus unpopular – subject, and, at the same time, the subject which has been explored to a serious degree ( also the magnitude of the Shoah makes any exploration insufficient).
There is a known opinion of Elie Wiesel about the incompatibility of the Shoah and cinema. Elie was a softly speaking and mildly mannered man, but on the subject of an impossibility in his view to film the Holocaust apart from existing documentary evidence he was emphatic and passionate.
When I was younger, I was surprised at his categorical refusal to see a possibility for cinema to feature the Shoah. The older I get, the more I understand what our wise and deep friend did mean. The naked horror of the Shoah in a multitude of its expressions which Elie and his contemporaries saw in real life was of such magnitude and impact , just because it was real, that no performing of it in his and many of the Holocaust survivors eyes was remotely close to the truth, and thus was perceived by many of them ( apart from Elie, I personally met and spoke with several of the survivors with similar views in the UK, US and Australia) like bordering with a travesty. Maybe, their all perception and understanding of cinema was of the kind that set the genre in the category of pure entertainment, with all its limitations. It is also possible.
The answer is simple: as long as there is a human story, cinema will always be there to cover it. A human story is the mightiest magnet and impulse for film-makers to act and create. When these stories are wrapped in a certain historic period or events, it appeals to those creators who are interested in the period.
That’s why one of the especially poignant moments of the Nuremberg film was the one in which the sides of the tribunal on the crimes against humanity, the first ever trial that has introduced the legal status of the crimes without the statute of limitation in history, got involved on the initiative of the line of defence ( which defence, actually, could be applied to the Nazis? , I always wonder on this aspect of the Nuremberg tribunal ) on , literally, how final meant to be the final solution.
The answer, instead of justly baffled prosecution, was provided by the presented at the tribunal – and in the new film – documented evidence from the death camps just after their liberation. The footage of the bulldozers throwing the mass of human corpses in the Belsen camp is one of the most compelling evidence of the finality of the final solution. And it has to be watched by any following generation, if we intend to keep humans.
In this respect, the new film does a good thing in educating new generations on the crucial historic facts of the recent past. In some moments of the film, otherwise keeping authentic to the period in the appearance of the actors and their costumes, it gets ambiguous , on purpose, and presenting some of them, both in appearance and acting, as the dialogue in a good scene between the main hero of the film, the US Army psychiatrist and his contemporary, the US Army translator who happen to be a German Jew, both in their late 20s – early 30s, as close to our times, as possible, without crossing the line and making a caricature of it.
I found this move to be a worthy one. It might be not scrupulously correct historically, but it is quite appealing psychologically, and in such moments, it is as if the film and its creators and actors are speaking directly to their modern-day’ audience, especially those of the age of the two protagonists on the screen. Such open dialogue is, actually, what films are made for.
Plus, the real story of the US Army’s young translator sergeant Howie Triest ,who was assigned to the commander of the prison for the top Nazi command, Colonel Burton C. Andrus ( who is played quite authentically by John Slattery ) is performed in the film by the British actor Leo Woodall with heartfelt effort and devotion.
In the telling historical fact, Colonel Andrus after his incredible experience as the commander of the prison in which all defendants of the International Nuremberg Tribunal were kept before and during the trial, has become the first American military attache to the State of Israel for years 1948-1949. It does make a lot of sense to me.
There is also one reason, perhaps even a core reason, of why the world of cinema is repeatedly returned to a very difficult and emotionally distressing theme of the Holocaust all this time from the 1960s ( when the first feature Shoah films appeared) onward. The reason is a steady incomprehensibility of the abyss of the Holocaust horrors by normal human beings. Thus, the core question: how on earth could that have happened? – still acts as a trigger for every new generation of directors, script-writers and actors. It is in human nature to strive to find the answer to powerful questions. But this one has been proven to be as unanswerable one.
With regard to the Nuremberg Tribunal back in 1945-1946, there are a couple of historic reminiscences telling authentically about a period attitude among the people towards ani-humanity. It has to do with the American public and some of the US authorities at the trial. Firstly, the US public genuinely had not a full picture of what was going on in Europe until the beginning of 1945, due to the way of the coverage of WWII and its atrocities has been done in the American media. It is only from the beginning of 1945 the US public started to learn about the real situation and the previous hideous crimes committed in Europe more or less adequately.
Secondly, psychologically, the level of the Nazi atrocities was too shocking for the American public to comprehend it, both in general when the US public just instinctively refused, or rather was incapable to believe that people can be murdered en masse. It went further on, affecting some of the US key-officials at the Nuremberg Tribunal, such as the US second prosecutor there, judge John F. Parker, who initially refused to believe , while working at the trial, in the fact of murders of children by the Nazis. He just cannot bring himself to such comprehension. In a well known among the historians episode of the trial, judge Parker was so deeply affected by the documentary footage that shown merciless mass murders of children during WWII that he was unable to get up from his bed in Nuremberg for three days.
Judge Parker and this telling episode are not part of the Nuremberg film made in 2025. The new film focuses on this aspect at the main American prosecutor at the trial, well-known judge Robert H. Jackson who indeed has played a very important role in the very fact that the Nuremberg International Tribunal will happen, thus setting up a vitally important and necessary precedent in the international law system as the response of the international human society to the conscious hatred, instrumentalised prejudice and the crimes against humanity, the deeds of anti-humanity. Before the Nuremberg Tribunal nothing of it existed, and from that perspective, the significance of the tribunal in 1945-1946 just cannot be overestimated. American actor Michael Shannon performs in his role of judge Jackson professionally and convincingly, even if sometimes over-pedalling.
One of the best episodes of the film is a fictional one, ironically. It is a never-occurred meeting between judge Jackson and the pope Pius XII, signore Pacelli ( played in the film very precisely and professionally by the Italian actor Giuseppe Cederna ). Educationally-wise, the short scene in which the American judge is snapping to the master of Vatican on their institution and his personal shameful role during WWII and with regard to the Holocaust, is truly important. These kinds of gems in a featured film are quite capable to generate a real interest among many people in the audience, who would like to know more about it and will start to check and read about it after seeing it in the movie. And this is a very positive outcome of the film’s researching the core of anti-humanity.
The Oscar for Intentions
Additionally to mentioned above successful roles in the Nuremberg film, two German actors playing two notorious Nazis, publisher of Der Strummer Julius Streicher ( played by Dieter Riesle ) and Rudolf Hess ( played by Andreas Pietschmann ) have created an adequate, not shallow or placard ones, but memorable portraits of those moral cripples and sheer criminals. It was done by both actors masterfully and with authentic understanding of what they are doing. In my opinion, the role of Streicher played by Dieter Riesle does deserve a special note.
Sadly, the main roles in the Nuremberg film have not been that successful. The choice of a very character actor Rami Malek for the US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly, a real person with a sad life and its tragic ending, was a very strange one. Maybe, Malek understood quite well everything about his role and the real-life person behind it. But his way of acting is anything close to the authenticity of that period and these events. It’s just another planet.
With regard to Russel Crowe who was invited to play Hermann Göring, and who is praised for the role widely, he is obviously trying his best ( as he always does), but he is simply not Göring. What we see on the screen in the new rendition of the Nazi evil is a cunning top manager who believes that he is running any shop he happens to be at. But Hermann Göring was probably the most complicated figure to crack among the bastardy hierarchy of the Third Reich. He was deeply devil-like, but far from an obvious way, according to the massive amount of existing literature on the matter. Russel Crowe is a master, and still in every of his roles, there is always Russel Crowe. It happens with many famous actors, whose level of personality is always present in every role. In this case, in my view, this towering factor did not turn out to be compatible with the most complex figure among the Nazi ruling elite.
In any historic film, the cinematography is half of its success, or the opposite. Twice so for the Holocaust movies , just because it has to be as authentic as possible but also not repeating known ways of Schindler’s List and the other modern classics on the subject. From that point of view, inviting a well-known Polish cinematographer Dariusz Wolsky was a good idea. He did his job at the high professional level and in the top way in which the Polish and Central European masters of cinematography are known for in general and in particular on the themes of WWII.
Sadly, all the high-quality cinematography undertaken by Dariusz Wolsky went under the editing and the way of presentation in a too-typical and too-expected Hollywood way, thus making the overall impression for the visual stream of the movie to correspond to that approach. No surprises, no intimacy, no revelations, no moments, except a couple of scenes, that would stay in one’s memory for a long time.
Still, despite all the new Nuremberg film’s shortcomings and all that Hollywood typicality in it, the film’s creators and team’s interest for the theme and their effort to bring it to a big screen today, their understanding of the importance of our still ongoing for eighty years search for humanity should be the prevailing criterium for considering their production. From that point of view, which actually, has no statute of limitation as we did find out recently and so painfully, if there would be the Oscar for intentions, my nominee for that category would be the Nuremberg ( 2025), certainly.
January 2026
