Soylent Green

Director: Richard Fleischer

1973 / 97min / DCP

Charlton Heston’s anguished delivery of the “punchline” of Soylent Green is the one aspect of the film that’s persisted in popular culture—if you know, you know—but the rest of Fleischer’s thriller, loosely based on Harry Harrison’s 1966 dystopian sci-fi novel Make Room! Make Room!, is just as angry and fervent and compelling; a detailed imagining of a future world of diminishing expectations, bottomless corruption, and packaged nostalgia being offered up as a cold comfort to the living. Edward G. Robinson, in his final onscreen role, goes out on a scene of self-administered euthanasia that just might break your heart.