When the first trailer for Nuremberg dropped, my first impression was of a somewhat mid-tier-headed-for-streaming period drama. Yet to my surprise and delight, this two-and-a-half-hour film is one of the best Oscar season contenders to hit cinemas so far this year. This is a good old-fashioned World War 2 epic, destined for award nominations; the kind of movie that was unapologetically so in the 1990s. Based on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, writer-director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg tells the true story of Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose job it was to determine if Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), was mentally fit to stand trial for his war crimes. What transpires is a hugely entertaining and accessible movie that simultaneously wrestles with the nuances and complexities of the subject matter that couldn’t be more relevant today.

Nuremberg opens with triumphant bombast, as an all-star cast of victorious Allies (Malek, John Slattery, Leo Woodall, Michael Shannon, Richard E Grant, Colin Hanks) prepare for the unprecedented task of putting the captured Nazi High-Command on fair trial, by international law, for their crimes against humanity. That is, rather than just immediately hanging the bastards, which they were genuinely considering prior. After all, the alliance of liberal Western democracies had to show the totalitarians that we’ll treat them by our standards of justice, even if they never afforded it to others.

The first act is full of energy, flicking between globe-trotting scenes with all the lightness and humour of a Downton Abbey film. This disturbingly translates to Kelley’s first interactions with Göring, who Crowe portrays as a master of manipulation: the charming, well-educated aviation officer and World War 1 hero; a family man who pretends he cannot speak English to get more information out of his captors, while remaining heavily reliant on his 50 pills a day drug addiction. The pair – portrayed powerfully by the two Oscar winners – build a complex “friendship” of trust, as the monster within begins to bear his ugly face in their one-on-one cell sessions.

But when the trial begins, the tone becomes much darker and more serious, with actual scenes of Holocaust bodies (piles and piles of them) that haven’t seen the light of day since 1945. It’s sobering and tear-jerking for the audience and the courtroom, as Göring denies all culpability. The old villain throws the proceedings back in the face of his captors as a victor’s show trial, pointing out that the German people elected the Nazis on the basis that they would dissolve democracy for strongman authoritarianism. Such Hitler sympathising and whatabouting is tragically on the rise again in the West, and the film makes no bones about it, alongside the well-trodden path of exploring Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil.

At one point, Göring tells Kelley that Hitler “wanted to Make Germany Great Again”, while Rami’s psychiatrist becomes an unpopular prophet, proclaiming that the roots of fascism lie in the US and that the next generation of Nazis won’t be wearing uniforms. The film’s ham-fisted warning becomes very on the nose, with a finger firmly pointed at the current occupant of the White House – a strange move, given all the complex nuance surrounding everything else in the film prior.

Such jarring conclusions are what stopped Nuremberg from being a 5-star film for me. Certainly, the movie rightly examines the place of international law in a world turning away from the overreach of post-war global consensus and back towards nationalism. Tragically, fascism and communism are beginning to look like viable options again to younger generations, as World War 2 moves from living memory to simply history. However, comparisons of the MAGA movement with Hitler is very dangerous territory, considering that when people think someone’s a Nazi, then it can be deemed moral (by some) to take out such people, alá the failed attempts on Trump’s life and the tragically successful assassination of Charlie Kirk. Sure, there’s a real concern with the likes of neo-Nazi Holocaust-denying creep Nick Fuentes going more mainstream, after his recent interview with his useful idiot Tucker Carlson. But the non-uniform-wearing neo-fascists the film should also be warning against are both the perpetrators of the Trump/Kirk plots and the thousands or perhaps millions who disgustingly celebrated them.

Nuremberg is released in UK cinemas from Friday.