Against all odds, Hollywood has a pretty decent track record when it comes to depicting world history. Of course, no movie can capture a major historical event with full faithfulness and complete comprehensiveness, but the best ones get the big things right. Does anyone doubt that Communism was as bad as it was presented in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago or that the Normandy landing was something like how it was depicted in the bloody, terrifying, numbing opening of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan? These movies may make all manner of concessions to dramatic structure, narrative expediency, and entertainment value, but in giving a sense of the sweep of large events, they often have a certain practical value — teaching tools for an increasingly and worryingly post-literate society. 

The new drama Nuremberg is an honorable entrant in this long-standing filmmaking tradition. With intelligence, vigor, and attentiveness to the historical record, writer-director James Vanderbilt recreates the preparation for, and prosecution of, the Nuremberg war trials, which, in 1945 and 1946, sought to impose the severest of legal consequences for the barbaric actions of high-ranking Nazi officials during the Second World War. Earlier film accounts of this period include Stanley Kramer’s fictionalized Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and the made-for-cable movie Nuremberg (2000), which, in what feels like a lifetime ago, starred Alec Baldwin as Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who stepped into the role of prosecutor during the trials.