Germany in autumn: "Nuremberg"

As far as this awards season goes - and in as much as Nuremberg can be considered an awards-season contender - this is as trad as it gets. A film based on historical events one can infer from that loaded title alone; a film where practically the first word to emerge from a fresh-faced American GI's mouth is a period-appropriate "jiminy"; a film where everything points and builds towards some form of courtroom activity. Pre-empted (at least on its UK theatrical release) by the Sky logo, Nuremberg is also the 2025-26 contender that most resembles a television miniseries, and may even have been pitched as such at some point in its genesis. That much becomes apparent from the surfeit of main characters jockeying for attention and screen time, and the levels of crosscutting and montage writer-director James Vanderbilt has had to maintain to lend his material cinematic shape, or to make ungainly history fit the template of stirring awards-season drama. Adapting Jack El-Hai's 2013 tome The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as a means of grappling with the Allies' prosecution of the German high command at the end of WW2, Vanderbilt adopts a two-pronged line of attack. His macro narrative concerns US Supreme Court judge Robert Houghwout Jackson (Michael Shannon) and his efforts to ensure German officials were fully prosecuted in a court of law - rather than merely executed on sight - while denied the opportunity to turn the dock into a soapbox. The micro narrative, playing out in a rabbit warren of underground prison cells, involves Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the hepcat psychiatrist pressganged into babysitting Nazi big fish Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) following the latter's capture and before the ensuing trial. In this lopsided cut, one of these throughlines proves more compelling and convincing than the other.

Much like the prosecution it describes, the film is unwieldy but noble: even those who won't see fit to applaud wholeheartedly will likely come away admiring the effort. Vanderbilt, an erratic writer-turned-director who will forever have the screenplay credit for 2007's Zodiac in his favour, has at least grasped both the importance and the implications of this particular historical moment: what it meant for Jackson to prosecute the likes of Göring, and what Kelley hoped to learn or otherwise gain from spending time in Göring's company. (An understanding of the evil the Nazis had wrought, for starters, though Kelley had also been recruited to garner the intelligence that might make that post-1945 shibboleth never again a reality.) As characterised here, Kelley is meant to be fickle and glib - as he freely admits, he's also intending to get a profitable book deal out of his endeavours - but Malek, giving by far the weakest performance here, elects to try and turn this ensemble piece into his own personal star vehicle. Introduced wowing a fellow train traveller with a card trick, this Kelley appears too busy thinking up business with props (coins, cigarettes, Aviator shades) to truly probe the darker recesses of Göring's psyche; Malek's default expression is a pop-eyed, self-satisfied smirk. I wondered whether he was the performer who first brought this book or script to the producers, making himself a non-negotiable consideration, an attached string. If not, this may well end up this season's foremost example of casting that unlocks valuable co-production finance (because - hey - Bohemian Rhapsody made the money it did) but is far from right for the role - or just wrong enough that we resent the pulling of focus. As it is, the film's most satisfying scene finds Army sergeant John Slattery dressing Malek-as-Kelley down for not comporting himself in the appropriate manner. If only Vanderbilt had done likewise.

It's a pity, because elsewhere Nuremberg upholds this filmmaker's tactic of standing back from his actors, awestruck, and allowing them to do what they do. It's a quiet, connoisseurial treat to watch Shannon, alternately grumpy and grave, feel his way through the various moral dilemmas the trial presents; the scenes with the Supreme Court judge share something of the brisk, lightly worn humanism of Matt Charman's script for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, blessed as they are with an actor determined to keep any vulgar grandstanding or false notes at arm's length. And Crowe is terrific, giving his almost-avuncular Göring a credible accent, a sly chuckle and a growing gravitational pull. You still wouldn't cross him, but he's better company than you might think; worryingly - and as with so many of Crowe's heavyweight roles, from Romper Stomper's Hando onwards - there are points where you could convince yourself, as Kelley apparently did, that you know and maybe even like this guy. Here is a man disturbingly at ease with a world he's left in ruins, rational enough to realise he's better off behind bars and taking his chances with what he perceives to be lesser, weaker men. The viewer's reward for sticking with it for two-and-a-half hours is a last-reel showdown between these two extremes - Jackson tall and upright in every sense, Göring squat and seated - which yields the most foursquare of Nuremberg's matinee pleasures. The long path there takes in scenes that function and scenes that don't quite, and nothing in Vanderbilt's storytelling is as potent as the actual concentration camp footage the film enters into the multiplex record as evidence in favour of a guilty verdict. That may well be a given, though, and at the very least demonstrates the film's core of ideological seriousness - a useful holdover from the last century - which not even a preening dilettante like Malek can entirely obscure.

Nuremberg is now playing in selected cinemas.