5. Total Recall (1990)
Based on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (1966)

Construction worker Douglas Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) longs to visit Mars, but can't afford it. So he heads to Rekall, a company that implants false memories, to give him the imagined experience of a trip to Mars. The wrinkle is that he actually has been to Mars before: he was a secret agent who had his memories erased when he ran afoul of the sinister corporation that administers the planet's settlement. Cue chase scenes, bloody shootouts, exploding eyeballs, and a memorably grotesque mutant named Kuato. It's hard to call the movie miscast, since the finished product is so quintessentially Schwarzeneggerian, but it would have made more sense were its lead a henpecked salaryman instead of a burly action star. (An unfilmed version under a different director is rumored to have had Richard Dreyfus attached.) Still, Paul Verhoeven's first film after Robocop is inventive and unpretentious, and probably the most fun PKD adaptation ever made. "Get your ass to Mars!"

4. Radio Free Albemuth (2010)
Based on Radio Free Albemuth (1977)

A writer named Phil narrates the bizarre story of his friend, music producer Nicholas Brady, whose mind has been zapped by an alien satellite. Brady becomes aware of an underground conspiracy called Aramcheck that  has existed for millennia and is dedicated to overthrowing the government of a near-future police state run by Richard Nixon. Oh, and the satellite might also be God. The bizarre-sounding story gets only more intriguing when you consider that it's based on Dick's real-life religious experiences in the mid-'70s. This independently produced film has not been officially released yet, but has had some festival screenings. When it finds a distributor, audiences will be treated to what is easily the most faithful Dick adaptation to date.

3. Minority Report (2002)
Based on "The Minority Report" (1956)

Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, a cop in a future where crimes are predicted by precognitive mutants, and the perpetrators arrested before they can commit their crimes. The system seems to work — there hasn't been a murder since Precrime was implemented — but when the precogs predict that Anderton will commit a murder, he goes on the run and tries to prove his (future) innocence. Minority Report's unconventional five-act structure makes it feel either epic or sprawling, depending on your opinion of the finished product. But it's a well-crafted chase movie with a strong sense of atmosphere, and does a reasonably good job of transferring Dick's speculations about free will into the action-movie format.

2. Blade Runner (1982)
Based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is tasked with tracking down and "retiring" a group of android replicants from an offworld colony that have killed their masters and snuck back to Earth. Cinema's first PKD adaptation is certainly the most influential, and its prescient, bleak cityscape has been an influence on three decades of dystopian science-fiction futures. The story is almost willfully opaque, but it's so gorgeously designed and shot that it doesn't really matter. Blade Runner's total aesthetic is unparalleled, and it's no surprise that it's still the most recognizable reference point for Philip K. Dick's writing.

1. A Scanner Darkly (2006)
Based on A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), smalltime drug dealer/addict, is secretly an undercover narcotics officer named Fred. But the drug he's using — Substance D — has split his mind in two, and neither personality is aware that they're the same person. Fred is informing on himself, and doesn't know it. Richard Linklater's adaptation of what Dick called his "anti-drug novel" is especially notable for its visual technique — it was shot with live actors, then painstakingly computer animated to produce a distinctive sense of altered reality. The end result captures the novel's mood perfectly, and if Reeves' performance is a bit flat, it only makes sense — after all, his character's emotions have been deadened by drugs. No other adaptation so thoroughly translates the unsettling atmosphere of Dick's writing to the screen.