Sony Pictures Classics has picked up the Russell Crowe period legal drama, Nuremberg, and seems to be setting the film for an awards season run.
Don’t call it a comeback, but could Russell Crowe be headed for another tilt at Oscars glory? No, really: don’t call it a comeback – it’s not like Crowe has disappeared or taken a hiatus from acting. The last five years or so have seen him pop up in some really fun genre material which has more than offset the occasional uninspired appearance in a superhero film.
With the upcoming Nuremberg however, could Crowe be headed back to the very peak of critical adoration? It’s been a quarter of a century since he won the Best Actor Oscar for 2000’s Gladiator, a win that came in the midst of a blistering run that saw him nominated three times in three years, The Insider and A Beautiful Mind being the other two films.
According to World Of Reel, Sony Pictures Classics has bagged the rights to Crowe’s next film and has set it for a November release, potentially putting the film in line for an awards run. Nuremberg is a legal drama that according to its synopsis, ‘chronicles the eponymous trials held by the Allies against the defeated Nazi regime. The film will centre on American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who is tasked with determining whether Nazi prisoners are fit to stand trial for their war crimes, and finds himself in a complex battle of wits with Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man.’
James Vanderbilt directs and Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, John Slattery and Richard E Grant will all feature alongside Crowe, who will play the Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring. Whilst it’s sometimes been fun to see Crowe embark upon an era where he’ll throw in with all sorts of projects, it’s rather exciting to see him return to prestige drama for the first time in a while.
Lining up against the rest of that cast is exactly the sort of challenge he’ll relish and we don’t envy Rami Malek having to go one and one against him on those courtroom scenes. Some 30 years later, the question of whether Cruise or Nicholson ‘won’ A Few Good Men is still debated and if we’re really lucky, maybe we’ll get another classic courtroom duel to discuss in the future.
More on this one as we hear it.
