NUREMBERG (2025)

This is a superb piece of filmmaking — "impeccably staged, directed and acted," in the source review's words — about the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate Hermann Göring before the Nuremberg trials, and the prosecutor building the case against Hitler's surviving inner circle. It argues, convincingly, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that any human heart can be seduced by that kind of evil.

It also earns its extreme caution. The film includes real, disturbing Holocaust footage — dead and emaciated victims, with some nudity — shown as evidence at the trial, plus 12 obscenities and six strong profanities, four of them using Christ's name.

If you're an adult ready for that weight, this is one of the year's most rewarding dramas. If you're choosing for children or young teens, look elsewhere — the material never softens. Watch it if you're prepared for a hard, true, well-made two and a half hours.

Adolf Hitler is dead, and Hermann Göring — his former second in command — surrenders to the Allies. As Robert H. Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court, builds the legal case against Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders, Captain Douglas Kelley, an American psychiatrist, is assigned to evaluate their sanity before trial. Kelley's sessions with the clever, charming Göring grow closer than they should. How far will that closeness go — and what will it cost the prosecution? That's where we'll leave you.

Four stars means top-tier filmmaking, and the source review doesn't hedge: "impeccably staged, directed and acted." Rami Malek's Kelley and Russell Crowe's Göring anchor a story built on interrogation-room tension rather than battlefield spectacle, and the film trusts real trial footage to do moral work no speech could. The result is a gripping drama about the evil that lurks in any human psyche — and a historical film confident enough to let its ending rest on the old adage "the facts win the case" rather than a closing monologue.

NUREMBERG mounts a strong moral case: Nazism's totalitarian evil is condemned without qualification, and the film sides clearly with Western jurisprudence and the rule of law over authoritarian power grabs. That's worth applauding.

But the film's moral compass is secular, not explicitly biblical. Captain Kelley, the psychiatrist at its center, concludes that any human being — not just a Nazi — can be seduced by radical evil. That's true, and it echoes Scripture, but Kelley reaches it through psychology, not theology, and the film never draws the connection. It also skips prosecutor Robert Jackson's real courtroom argument that the tribunal answered to a "Law Above the Law" — the transcendent moral standards of Scripture itself. Instead, the film lets horrifying Holocaust footage carry the argument: evil is evil because we can see it, not because God has said so.

That's a real gap for a film willing to be this serious. Still, what it affirms — that power without restraint corrupts, that atrocity has a face, that no one is immune to evil's pull — lines up with what the Bible has said all along: "The intention of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21).

NUREMBERG is a superb piece of dramatic filmmaking about the evil that absolute power breeds — and a hard watch, full of disturbing Holocaust footage and harsh language, despite its PG-13 rating. Our verdict stands: worth the trip — adults only. Planning a family movie night instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.