Sometimes certain genres, writers, filmmakers and actors have weirdly distributed careers. They'll make a truly great film followed by three really terrible films, or maybe just a good film followed by a few that inspire indifference. The purpose of Do & Don't is to separate the successes from the duds, making a road map of all the places you ought to stop and, just as importantly, all the places you ought to pass by without a second glace. The first artists to get the +/- treatment is author Philip K. Dick, or more specifically those of his works that have been adapted to film.

Philip K. Dick was a true science fiction visionary. Throughout the 50's, 60's and 70's he created some of the genre's greatest stories, taking modern concerns and anxieties and giving them intriguing twists from his dark but vivid imagination. Between 1982 and 2007 there have been nine adaptations of his stories for the big screen, though not all of them are keepers. If you're going to start anywhere with PK Dick's adaptations, you could do a lot worse than at the beginning. If you enjoy thoughtful sci-fi, Do watch Ridley Scott's cyberpunk masterpiece Bladerunner. Based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968, Bladerunner stars Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who specializes in tracking down illegal, dangerous androids called Replicants when they show up on Earth from their work posts off-world. Initially a flop, the film has gone on to be canonized as one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. There are scads of versions, including a lengthy director's cut, but which one you choose doesn't really matter. The story is the same and the greatest scenes are intact. A big plus is how well the visual effects have aged.

As good as the first Dick adaptation is, the most recent leaves a lot to be desired. Director Lee Tamahori and a gaggle of hack screenwriters absolutely demolished their adaptation of The Golden Man first published in If Magazine in 1953. Unless you have a fetish for overblown action movies starring Nicolas Cage, Don't watch the abysmal thriller Next. What began as a high sci-fi story about a psychic mutant in a post-apocalyptic future itself mutated into a gimmicky thriller about nuclear weapons.

Just a year previous, Richard Linklater made what is perhaps the most faithful film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, the rotoscope drama A Scanner Darkly. Delightfully weird and unlike anything else in cinema, it's an occasionally disturbing trip into the lives of people addicted to a fictional drug called Substance D. A Scanner Darkly is one of Dick's most personal and stirring stories, so Do enjoy the artistry of Linklater and his cast's take on an already excellent novel.

The most high-profile adaptation of Dick's work to date is Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. Spielberg added a lot of extra bells and whistles to Dick's original story about the moral grayness of law and the philosophical implications of intent but they mostly serve to make the story exciting. Do watch Minority Report but do so with a bag of popcorn and less of an expectation for literary docility.

Lastly, Paul Verhoeven's bizarre 1990 action movie Total Recall is somewhat contentious in this context. Its premise is mostly faithful to Dick's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" but it injects the psychodrama with a load of testosterone in the form of a gun-toting Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not a bad movie by any stretch, it's just not as cerebral as Dick's story. Do watch Total Recall if you want to see papier mache breasts and lots of violence but Don't watch it if you want to see a proper adaptation of Philip K. Dick's fiction.