Castle of Sand

It starts off as a routine police procedural, with two detectives investigating the mysterious death of an old man at a Tokyo railway station. As they gather clues and build their case, the cops start to discover that the mystery of the murdered man stretches far beyond anything they imagined, right to the doors of a concert hall where a young composer is premiering his new symphony, Destiny. Tetsuro Tamba and Kensaku Morita give good performances as the cops, but director Yoshitaro Nomura is the real star of this film. The way he transforms a generic series of flashbacks into an operatic exploration of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man – all done with music and images, no dialogue -- raise this movie to the level of true cinematic art.