By skyforbes One of the smartest choices the film makes is the parallel it draws. The Second World War begins with the Nuremberg Laws and ends with the creation of international law. That contrast is powerful and intentionally contradictory. The same concept, law, was used for tyranny and then for accountability. But law is never the same thing as justice. Law is a system. Justice is moral. The film touches this tension without trying to wrap it up neatly.
What really works is that director James Vanderbilt knows the movie cannot tell the whole story. Instead it chooses a specific angle and sticks to it. The omissions feel intentional instead of incomplete.
This is where the magic tricks come in. Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek, performs two of them. The first trick, where he lets Lila McQuaide (Lydia Peckham) do the trick herself, is the movie telling you to shift your point of view. The story makes the most sense when you watch it from the perspective of justice itself, not the Allies and definitely not the Nazis.
The second trick, a sleight-of-hand, is basically the film admitting that you are only seeing part of the picture. History works the same way. What you are shown is never everything.
Göring uses his own version of sleight-of-hand too, especially in the ambiguity around how he ended his life. The film does not dig into it and that silence says a lot.
The performances make all of this land. Russell Crowe’s Göring is unsettlingly charismatic and completely convinced of himself. Michael Shannon gives Robert Jackson the mix of idealism and frustration the role needs. Lydia Peckham’s journalist frames the story from the start and reminds you that everything is being interpreted and reported.
Some truths inevitably stay outside the frame, and one of them is the story of Albert Göring, Hermann’s brother. Albert openly resisted the Nazi regime. He helped victims, forged documents, sheltered Jews, and used his brother’s infamous name to free people who would otherwise have been killed. He was interrogated at Nuremberg and cleared, yet none of that mattered. He stepped back into the world carrying a name that had become synonymous with evil. He lived and died under a cloud he did not create.
His story is not about sympathy. It is about fallout. It shows how the shadow cast by Nazism did not stop at the guilty; it reached the innocent, the resistant, even the heroic. It stained families, villages, countries, and generations. Albert’s life is a reminder that the consequences of that regime extended far beyond the men who built it. The weight of their actions was so immense that even someone who spent the war saving lives could not escape it.
His absence from the film underlines its central point: no single narrative can contain the entire moral landscape of that era. Some stories remain in the margins, not because they are unimportant, but because the shadow itself is bigger than any one film can illuminate.
Nuremberg gives you one part of the truth and then hints at everything you don’t see. Justice and the aftershock of that era go far beyond the law and far beyond any film.
And in the current state of the world, that perspective feels painfully relevant.