Yes, when the movie is a prime example of how to write a compelling story that’s historical, by the way, and compress it into two hours of edge of your seat action.

Except this isn’t an action thriller. Most of it takes place in prison cells and in a court room, but it’s tense and intense. It also shows how a good writer can take primary source material and turn it into a great story.

The movie is Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering and Rami Malek as Dr. Douglas Kelly, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who is assigned to evaluate the 21 Nazis put on trial for war crimes after World War II. Kelly comes under the thrall of Goering, and Crowe’s Oscar-worthy portrayal of Hitler’s second-in-command shows us precisely how he literally made people follow him. A powerful lesson for today.

As an 11- or 12-year old, I saw the movie Judgement at Nuremberg on TV. Yes, that was how you saw a movie that never came to your small-town theater, on TV, one or two years after the fact. It, too, was about the trial of those same Nazi war criminals, and whereas I remember it fascinated me, today I don’t remember that much about it. So, that may warrant another look.

My father was in World War II with Patton’s 4th Armored Division, one that liberated some concentration camps. (During the trials, he was part of a security detachment and saw some sessions. He wasn’t there for the verdicts, having been injured in a tank accident, but his opinion was the Nazis got what they deserved.) My father rarely talked about what he did in the war, but he always tried to answer questions when I was curious about something. A high school U.S. history unit on World War II led to more questions and to reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and eventually in college I’d focus my history studies on the time between the World Wars in Germany and the Soviet Union.

I’ve watched documentaries about the Nuremberg trials and read material on Goering’s life. An air ace in World War I, he became involved in National Socialism post-war and was a participant in Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch. He was wounded and became addicted to morphine. He had a charismatic personality, and women adored him despite his portliness.

At a critical point in the trial portrayed in Nuremberg, a prosecutor tries to get Goering to denounce Hitler’s final solution for Europe’s Jews. But Goering can’t. Such is his devotion to Hitler that, even with his life on the line, he cannot bring himself to denounce a man who ruined Germany instead of uplifting it. A powerful scene with incredible acting and dialogue.

When you’re taught to think critically, one of the first questions you ask about the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s is “How could this happen?”

The answer comes from some brilliant dialogue crafted for one character, a U.S. Army sergeant who’d served as Dr. Kelly’s interpreter when he interviewed the prisoners. I’ll paraphrase:

“You can ask how it could happen here, but all it took was for no one to speak out until it was too late.”

Americans need to see this movie, not simply for the history, which is pertinent to today, but also for the precedent.

Nuremberg was directed by James Vanderbilt and written by Jack El-Hai, based on Dr. Kelly’s failed book about his experiences and a biography of Kelly.