Soylent Green (1973) depicts a dreary future indeed but hardly follows the pattern; this near future seems irrevocable (and frighteningly inevitable). It's a detective story set in the year 2022; population is up and, due to the greenhouse effect, food production is down. New York's forty million people live on the edge of starvation. Services and any niceties of civilization are nil. A New York City detective is assigned to the murder of a VIP; murders are legion and mostly unsolvable, but this case seems something special; it involves the new food, soylent green on which most people now depend for subsistence. That soylent green is made from bodies of the human dead will not come as a great surprise (and is really rather logical, if you think about it), but getting the revelation is more than half the fun.

Directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Charlton Heston, Edward G Robinson.