Nuremberg: The Film That Hits “Like a Freight Train” and Leaves Audiences Shaken, Silent, and Forever Changed

TORONTO – November 18, 2025 – A storm has arrived, and it’s tearing through cinemas with the force of history itself. Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt’s harrowing new historical drama, has detonated onto screens with a near-perfect 98% audience score and a chorus of viewers declaring it “mandatory viewing for an entire generation.” Inspired by Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film plunges into the psychological aftermath of the 1945–46 Nuremberg Trials, where U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is tasked with evaluating Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) and other top Nazis to determine their fitness to stand trial. What begins as clinical duty spirals into a soul-shattering duel of intellects, morality, and humanity, with rising star Leo Woodall as a young Jewish-American interpreter whose hidden family ties to Auschwitz threaten to unravel everything.

Crowe, almost unrecognizable beneath prosthetics and a morphine-fueled sneer, delivers a career-redefining Göring—not a cartoon villain, but a charming, morphine-addicted intellect who seduces Kelley into a chess game of the soul. Malek, in a performance critics are calling “electrifying” and “Oscar-bound,” is Kelley’s haunted mirror: a brilliant mind descending into obsession, smuggling Göring’s brain tissue home and ultimately mirroring his subject’s cyanide suicide in 1958. Woodall, fresh from The White Lotus, steals scenes as Lieutenant Daniel Margolies, his raw breakdown in the witness box already tipped as “the moment that will win him everything.”

Early screenings have left audiences shell-shocked. “It hits like a freight train,” one TIFF attendee wrote on Letterboxd. “I walked out silent, tears streaming, unable to speak for 20 minutes.” Another: “This should be shown in every school. History isn’t just dates—it’s this.” The film’s power lies in its refusal to sanitize: recreated Nuremberg cells inside a decommissioned Polish bunker, real 1945 audio of Göring’s suicide note, and a 12-minute single-take interrogation that reportedly triggered walkouts. “We didn’t make a movie,” director Vanderbilt told Variety. “We exhumed a ghost.”

Critics are unanimous. The Guardian awards five stars: “A moral autopsy of the 20th century—Crowe and Malek possess, they don’t act.” Variety predicts “Oscar sweeps,” singling Malek’s “Hannibal Lecter-level terror” and Woodall’s “gut-wrenching vulnerability.” Even the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum endorsed it—with a rare under-16 warning. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 94% critics, 98% audience, with posts screaming “mandatory viewing” and “Schindler’s List for the mind.”

Opening November 15 across 3,200 theaters, Nuremberg grossed $52 million domestically its first weekend—a record for R-rated historical dramas. Apple TV+ secured streaming rights for $90 million, with global rollout December 1. Educators are petitioning curricula inclusion; over 250,000 signatures demand it replace outdated WWII units.

Nuremberg isn’t comfortable. It’s confronting. It’s breathtaking. And as one viewer wrote after a sold-out screening: “I’ve never left a cinema feeling so shaken, so silent, so changed.” Russell Crowe haunts. Rami Malek electrifies. Leo Woodall breaks your heart. This is the film that rewrites how we remember the past—and demands we never forget it.