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Obscenely ill-judged / The film Nuremberg is almost unforgivable

6 1
18.11.2025

It is said there is only one rule when it comes to dramatising the Holocaust: don’t. The argument is essentially this: the unique horror of the event is beyond the scope of conventional artistic representation. Illuminate what happened with a documentary, sure, but apply a glossy Hollywood sheen to those monstrous events and you risk artistic catastrophe.

I’ve seen many productions which fall into that category but here’s two recent ones: Hunters, an Al Pacino series for Amazon which portrays a gang of 1970s New York Nazi hunters as superhero vigilantes, and Sky Atlantic’s tastefully shot The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a sentimental, semi-fictionalised (why? Is the truth not enough?) account of........

© The Spectator