This year, 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of the commencement of the Nuremberg Trials, when 22 of the highest-ranking surviving leaders of Nazi Germany were placed in the dock to answer for their crimes against humanity.

Those trials were a landmark in many ways, but 80 years is a long time. For many in Generations Y and Z, for whom WWII was not a staple of their education or everyday cultural intake, this is fast becoming the stuff of ancient history. In tackling those events and reminding us of their importance in an age when fascist thinking is again on the rise, screenwriter and director James Vanderbilt has a lot of heavy lifting to do.

Rami Malik and Russell Crowe in Nuremburg. Image supplied

Names which haunted people born in the post-war era – Himmler, Hess, Streicher and Göring among them – are not as grimly familiar as they once were. Inevitably, the educative task weighs a little heavily on Vanderbilt’s screenplay, which has a lot of explaining to do before we get to the crux of the drama: the battle of wills between Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, and an American psychiatrist, Dr Douglas Kelley, drafted by the army to assess the mental fitness of Göring and his ilk and covertly provide prosecutors with an insight into how they intended to conduct their defence.

Kelley also has his eye on another prize: if he could write a book about the trial – and about the notion of “evil” itself – he’d be a superstar in his field, and rich with it.

Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Image supplied

Digitally recreating the destruction that Stanley Kramer’s 1961 courtroom epic Judgment at Nuremberg was able to capture in reality, Nuremberg is a somberly handsome film, stately in pace but reasonably gripping once we get to the cat-and-mouse of well-matched opponents who warily attain “frenemy” status in the manner of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter.

A hulking, sometimes beaming Russell Crowe plays Göring, capturing the Reichsmarschall’s vast sense of entitlement, his venality and – riskier still – his abundant charm and charisma.

Rami Malek’s wide-eyed, twitchy Kelley is rather harder to swallow. John Slattery crackles as prison commandant Burton C. Andrus, and Michael Shannon’s grit and gravitas cast US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson as something of a natural successor to Abraham Lincoln. Leo Woodall, playing American army translator Howie Triest, brings some valuable emotion to a film that’s heavy with dialogue. Richard E. Grant makes hay with the role of British Tory MP and prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe.

Vanderbilt’s decision to play up Kelley’s relationship with Göring’s former actress wife, Emmy (played sympathetically by Lotte Verbeek), is a misstep. She’s pitched as a heartbroken, vulnerable and ordinary woman begging for news of her man. In reality, the woman known as Frau Reichsmarschall lived high on the hog and knew very well where her hubby’s vast accumulation of wealth and artworks came from. Kelley’s dalliance with a vivacious newspaper report is no less jarring.

The presentation of a lengthy segment of the documentary footage taken during the liberation of the Nazi death camps reminds us, very starkly, why these trials had to take place. But it also serves to show up what a glossy and dramatically conventional concoction Nuremberg really is.

Nuremburg screens in cinemas nationally from 4 December.

148 minutes

Rated M