James Vanderbilt
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Filmography
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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
influenced Nuremberg (2025)
Themes Characters Plot
Imagine Judgment at Nuremberg refracted through Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter’s relationship in The Silence of the Lambs.
Hermann Göring was a flat-out monster, so scenes where the psychiatrist interacts with him should have an intense vibe similar to the Clarice Starling/Hannibal Lecter dynamic in The Silence of the Lambs.
There’s a certain flavor of “Silence of the Lambs,” of course, with the German general as the super-intelligent locus of evil and the shrink as the somewhat naive innocent who thinks he can match wits with him.
There are definite similarities between the Göring-Kelley relationship and the one between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs—questions of morality and ethics, and intellectual power versus low animal cunning.
The film dives headfirst into a “Silence of the Lambs” cross-examination between Kelley and Göring, as the two match wits by trying to outsmart each other in a game of mental chess.
Films like Oppenheimer, which Vanderbilt seems especially eager to replicate in terms of its active pacing, heavily descriptive writing and even the use of shared cast member Rami Malek, managed to earn its unlikely combination of epic filmmaking and stuffy exposition through engrossing technical aspects like its cinematography and editing.
You also get a slight sense of post-Oppenheimer cinema in the pretty rapid pacing, and it’s to its credit that it doesn’t feel like too much of a heaving object despite a two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
Arguably, this was worse than the part Albert Einstein magically appears to see Julius Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer.
Malek’s post-Academy Award shtick has become so immediately grating as to torpedo nearly every project in which he’s appeared (save Oppenheimer, in which he was graciously wrangled into brief moments).
Malek vs. Director James Vanderbilt (writer behind Fountain of Youth) makes a good stab at it, following U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played brazenly by Rami Malek, as seen in Oppenheimer and Amsterdam), who is tasked to psychoanalyze Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe, incredible here).
Highlighting the banality of evil has become a trend in recent Holocaust dramas like The Zone of Interest. But unlike that film, Nuremberg relies on didactic expository dialogue.
…as an exploration of Nazi evils the film pales in comparison to Jonathan Glazer's masterwork The Zone of Interest (2023).
It’s unfair to make the comparison to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Still, Glazer’s film was willing to sit uncomfortably with evil long enough to dissect it without turning its characters into a sideshow of Hollywood tropes. The problem is that it’s not as accessible as Vanderbilt’s film. They share the intent of dissecting evil, but Glazer is much clearer about how he wants to approach it, while Vanderbilt strings together a few conceptually interesting ideas before sacrificing them all for a more generic absolute.
…just as 2023’s The Zone of Interest depicted, Nuremberg captures how the Holocaust was not carried out by some supernatural evil but by everyday people so entrenched in their beliefs, ambition, and power that they committed horrific acts against their fellow human beings.
It brings to mind similar stakes and logistical dilemmas journalists faced in Spotlight, where a group of characters must navigate their morals while doing what must be done.
This film is directed by Kyle Newacheck, who co-created Comedy Central’s long-running hit Workaholics and directed many of those episodes; curiously, it was written by James Vanderbilt, who penned the CBS News-scandal docudrama Truth (starring a fabulously frazzled Cate Blanchett) and the underseen D.C. siege movie White House Down .
Screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Rundown, Truth) can’t figure out how to organically flesh out Nick and Audrey as people, so the script crams all we need to know about them into an uninteresting, uninspired fifteen minute opening whirlwind, packed with an alarming amount of product placement for Uber Black, Labatt Blue, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Monster Energy, Claratin, and most strangely of all for a Netflix production, Amazon.
(Can screenwriter James Vanderbilt really have co-written Zodiac and Truth ?) Sandler and co-star Jennifer Aniston deliver middling marital banter that might, in a crowded opening-weekend theater, earn an occasional chuckle; in the living room, though, expect lots of dead air.