NEW YORK (OSV News) – As the historical drama “Nuremberg” (Sony Pictures Classics) successfully reminds its audience, the trials held in the titular German city in the aftermath of World War II almost didn’t happen. What takes place in the uncertain lead-up to them kicks off the film’s action.

Summoned to the temporary prison for former Nazi leaders Allied forces nicknamed Camp Ashcan, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a psychiatrist holding the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, is assigned to assess its inmates. The senior — and by far most intriguing — figure among them is ex-Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe).

Swayed by his preeminent patient’s deceptive charm, the analyst wavers between tentative friendship for him and the need to assist the military and legal authorities. The latter include Ashcan’s hard-driving commandant, Col. Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery), and, eventually, the lead American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon).

Crowe’s multi-faceted performance as the wily Goering propels writer-director James Vanderbilt’s adaptation of Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.” By turns genial, cunning and — more consistently — impossibly vain, the World War I flying ace seeks to distance himself from the horrific crimes committed by the regime he subsequently served.

The principal moral point of the movie is that those bewilderingly evil actions — the full extent of which was only beginning to be understood as evidence was gathered for the international tribunal at which Goering would be tried — not only cannot be excused or minimized, they can’t even be contextualized by any feeble effort at establishing an imagined ethical equivalent.

Some moviegoers may conclude that Malek’s highly personalized performing style makes him a poor choice to play Kelley, insofar as the analyst is meant to serve as an Everyman conduit into the story for viewers. Yet his tightly wound, driven demeanor pairs well with the suave restraint with which Crowe endows Goering and helps keep the pace of the proceedings snappy.

As detailed below, “Nuremberg” includes a number of elements best suited to grown-ups. In light of the picture’s potential educational value in providing an accurate retrospective on a vital series of events, however, many parents may consider it acceptable — as well as informative — fare for older adolescents.

The film contains disturbing footage of crimes against humanity, a hanging, suicides, a scene of urination, partial nudity, several profanities, a few milder oaths, at least one rough term and a handful of crude and crass expressions. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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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 servic 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-intentioned 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.

It becomes clear that the doctor has his own interests in mind with this unique task as well. At one point while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, Kelley verbalizes “Someone could write a book” and off he dashes to the library with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow. That book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis.

One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed capable of such horrors (the film grinds to an appropriate halt in a crucial moment to simply let the characters and the audience take in devastating concentration camp footage). Human beings, not monsters, were the architects of the Final Solution.

But human beings can also fight against this if they choose to, and the rule of law can prevail if people make the choice to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials start because Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn’t let anything so inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing what’s right.

Kelley’s motivations are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these men and their pathologies, particularly the disarming Göring, and in the name of science the doctor dives headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should, eventually ferrying letters back and forth between Göring and his wife and daughter, still in hiding. He finds that Göring is just a man — a megalomaniacal, arrogant and manipulative man, but just a man. That makes the genocide that he helped to plan and execute that much harder to swallow.

Crowe has a planet-sized gravitational force on screen that he lends to the outsize Göring and Shannon possesses the same weight. A climactic scene between these two actors in which Jackson cross-examines Göring is a riveting piece of courtroom drama. Malek’s energy is unsettled, his character always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting but unbalanced together.

Vanderbilt strives to imbue “Nuremberg” with a retro appeal that sometimes feels misplaced. John Slattery, as the colonel in charge of the prison, throws some sauce on his snappy patter that harks back to old movies from the 1940s, but the film has been color-corrected into a dull, desaturated gray. It’s a stylistic choice to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it’s also ugly as sin.

Vanderbilt struggles to find a tone and clutters the film with extra story lines to diminishing results. Howie’s personal history (based on a true story) is deeply affecting and Woodall sells it beautifully. But then there are the underwritten female characters: a saucy journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelley drunk to draw out his secrets for a scoop, and Justice Jackson’s legal clerk (Wrenn Schmidt) who clucks and tsks her way through the trial, serving only as the person to whom Jackson can articulate his thoughts. Their names are scarcely uttered during the film and their barely-there inclusion feels almost offensive.

So while the subject matter makes “Nuremberg” worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon) and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance. If the film is intended to be a canary in a coal mine, that bird has long since expired.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Within the first few minutes of director Shōji Kawamori‘s Labyrinth, protagonist Shiori laments that “without smartphones, humanity would be doomed”. From the events that later transpire, I suspect Kawamori’s opinion is quite the opposite. Kawamori is, of course, best known for his lifetime of work on the Macross franchise, which features mecha battles, idol singers, and love triangles in most of its entries. If you squint a little, each of these main obsessions is also present in Labyrinth. It seems that Kawamori can’t help himself. Whether these elements mesh together to make a satisfying film is another matter entirely. Whereas his most beloved film, Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, is a timeless classic, Labyrinth‘s reliance on modern tech and the anxieties around it almost instantly date it.

At the end of the screening, with my head in my hands, I sighed to myself, “How in hell’s name am I supposed to review this?” It’s a movie that almost defies explanation; any attempt to summarise the plot is likely to leave me gibbering incomprehensibly. I guess I’ll have to try. Suffice to say, Labyrinth is not by any means a “good” film. However, it’s certainly an entertaining one, and often (unintentionally) hilarious. Watching along with a highly engaged audience at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival was probably the best mode of experience for Labyrinth, for without my fellow cinemagoers’ stunned, disbelieving laughter, I doubt I would have survived to the end of its bloated, almost two-hour-long runtime.

Shiori is supposed to be the audience insert, an anxious high school girl who constantly apologizes for her mere existence. The daughter of a titanic judo instructor with the most impressively imposing moustache this side of Ivo Robotnik, she rejects her family’s focus on self-improvement via martial arts. Instead, she records social media videos with her female best friend Kirara. Their friendship is somewhat unequal – Kirara is far more outgoing and confident, and Shiori secretly seethes that her videos accrue far more “likes” from the faceless online masses. In fact, Shiori uses a secret, anonymous account to spew her negativity onto the internet rather than owning it as part of herself.

It’s this sublimated jealousy and insecurity that not only fractures their friendship but also Shiori’s identity. When her beloved smartphone screen cracks, it sends ruptures through her reality, as her persona splits in two – the more anxious version trapped within an almost Silent Hill-like alternative dimension, a shadowy analogue to the real world but empty of people, and a more confident “ideal” version that instantly becomes more outgoing. Ideal Shiori dons a VTuber-style two-tone wig and sets her sights on becoming a modern media superstar, the most popular Japanese high school girl, with a goal of garnering 100 million “likes.” She views her anxious alter ego as an impediment, and frequently taunts her through her apparently cloned smartphone, which seems to be able to dial its identical equivalent in the digital world, somehow without generating network errors.

We mostly view the story through Anxious Shiori’s eyes. She journeys through a dark, ominous liminal space populated by the souls of others similarly sucked into the digital underworld, where they are transformed, unsettlingly, into the smartphone stickers that best approximate their personalities. Anxious Shiori herself tended to contribute to friend group chats mainly via stickers as a way to hide her true emotions, engaging only at a surface level. The constant demand for connectivity and reciprocal communication is shown to be exhausting and all-consuming; so, when Kirara completely disconnects and ghosts Shiori, she panics that maybe Kirara has also been sucked into this world and lost her soul. The only thing preventing Shiori from losing hers is that her smartphone remains charged. Yes, in Labyrinth all that stands between humanity and devolution into mute digital emoticons is the presence of a spare battery pack. I know that I can get anxious when out and about and running low on charge, but Labyrinth takes battery anxiety to the extreme.

Human souls are bound and pressed by enormous industrial devices that pound three-dimensional bodies into flat images, with reams of red digital text spewing from between heavy plates, clearly symbolising blood. It’s cool imagery that I wish the film had leaned into a little more heavily. If anything, the aesthetic is similar to the recent Hatsune Miku movie Colorful Stage, although with significantly less music, unfortunately.

Anxious Shiori meets Komori, a sad-looking pink bunny sticker person who seems to know a lot about this world – the eventual reveal of his true identity is probably meant to be a huge shock, but I guessed it instantly. It’s not the most subtly plotted of films. Komori is quite fun, especially when he becomes so hapless and useless that Shiori has to attach a dog collar and string to drag him around behind her, floating like a balloon and bumping into things.

If it wasn’t already deranged, Labyrinth‘s central plot goes full batshit insane later on, with the evil mastermind Suguru Kagami planning to “liberate everyone’s ideal selves,” and it’s up to Anxious Shiori and Komori to try to prevent this… somehow.

Aesthetically, the film has its moments, especially in the digital underworld that acts as a dark mirror to our own. Unfortunately, all of the character animation is accomplished using 3D CG, which, while it does a reasonable job of emulating 2D animation, lacks any real-life authenticity. The characters move like dolls rather than real, living, breathing characters. There’s something about the natural exaggeration of movement, such as squashing and stretching, and other techniques often employed in traditional animation that bring life to character movement, which is all but absent. Yes, there’s some reasonably amusing slapstick here and there, and funny character expressions, but it’s a far cry from the verve and atmosphere of Kawamori’s previous works.

For much of Labyrinth, the festival audience sat in silence until some of the nuttier plot decisions were met with incredulous guffaws. Mostly, the film plays itself very straight, which is odd for a story featuring a floating pink bunny character and an evil music producer who wants to rule the world. One particular scene where Kagami takes Ideal Shiori to his bedroom and begins to suggestively unzip his tracksuit top was met with hysterical audience laughter that will become obvious if you see the film.

Multiple similar examples litter Labyrinth, and it’s hard to tell if these insane choices that trigger such hilarity are deliberate or not, and that’s why the film is so hard to rate. None of the pieces fit together properly. Anxious Shiori, for most of the film, is a fairly unengaging, dull protagonist, though her fake/ideal version is much more fun, which is probably the point. Kagami makes for a somewhat underwhelming villain, with an unclear plan that seems overly convoluted. The rules of the world seem to change upon the writer’s whim, and crazy stuff happens mostly out of nowhere. It’s like a laundry list of bonkers ideas all strung together without any coherent plan.

I found Labyrinth a struggle to endure, yet found certain aspects very entertaining. Perhaps my mistake was watching it stone cold sober. As one of my fellow festival attendees noted, it’s probably best viewed with at least a few beers on board already. I certainly can’t unreservedly recommend Labyrinth, but if you’re hankering for some good old “WTF am I even watching right now?”, then Labyrinth has you covered.