Interesting but unbalanced pair in 'Nuremberg'

A timid approach undoes performances by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.

- KATIE WALSH

ARMY psychiatrist (Rami Malek), left, and Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) before the Nazi's trial.

(Scott Garfield Sony Pictures)

Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and watching.

These films are edifying (and cathartic) in a way that could almost be considered a public service and that's what works best in James Vanderbilt's "Nuremberg," about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate wake of World War II. It's a drama that is well-in-tentioned and elucidating despite some missteps.

For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his "Zodiac" screenplay for David Fincher, adapts "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Dr. Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.

The film is a two-hander shared by Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley. At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad-hoc Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants. Immediately, he's intrigued at the thought of sampling so many flavors of narcissism.