Crowe's glossy Nazi drama stumbles more than it soars

'Nuremberg', an unexpectedly zippy film, peels back hell's curtain but doesn't follow through

- Clarisse Loughrey

There are more zingers than you'd expect in Nuremberg, which dramatises the trial of Nazi commander Hermann Göring.

Stretches of it, in fact, are paced like we're chasing the downfall of crafty mobsters rather than the architects of the unthinkable. Various high-ranking members of the party are introduced with the zap-pow of newspaper headlines, technicolour recreations, and salacious details. Robert Ley was captured in his pyjamas, didn’t you know?

It makes sense, in part, for the story being told here. Yet Nuremberg can ultimately only justify its Hollywood sheen for so long. The film’s written and directed by James Vanderbilt, behind the screenplays for both David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston Murder Mystery comedies, and he draws here mostly from Jack El-Hai’s 2013 nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.