T he claim Philip Kindred Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick's signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of fast-approaching crisis. Something dislocates, something accelerates, a wire touches another wire and we know -- quiveringly -- that we have to fit ourselves for a lasting ontological derangement. Quality control was never Dick's problem (capable, in his speed-gobbling prime, of writing up to 30 short stories a year, he barely had time to look over his shoulder at the exhaust cloud of output in his wake). But it is ours, and nearly 50 years after it was written, "The Minority Report," Dick's short story, makes for very shaky reading. Soft-boiled, snatching at clichés ("Witwer is making hay, hand over fist," bellows one character unbelievably. "He's got the whole country screaming for your blood!"), it gives off the special low-rent musk of poorly paid hackwork, of a writer selling out for...

I could have walked out of Enigma . Not in anger -- not in that state of congested indignation that sometimes forces cinemagoers to their feet, huffing and puffing and clawing for their coats in the darkness -- but through simple lack of concern. Which surprised me, because almost any film set in England in 1943 has, for me, an automatic power and pull: wartime England, my God, I am (aren't you?) rank with false nostalgia for it -- with implanted memories of the brave cities and the murmuring countryside, the voices of leaders on the radio, the turned-up trousers and the coal smoke, the pluck, the pep, the upper lip! Further, Enigma is about the code breakers of Bletchley Park, the quiet wizards of decryption who sat in stuffy rooms 60 miles outside of London and burrowed into Hitler's orders for his U-boats, changing the course of the war at sea and thereby saving uncounted thousands of lives. Heroes all. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay (adapted from a novel by Robert Harris) and...