Audiences 1, Critics 0: This is a Brilliant Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (26 October 2012)

Thirty years ago I staggered out of a movie theater on the opening afternoon of a new movie that I thought had brilliantly pushed the boundaries of what film could do, only to discover over the next week or two that critics had largely hated it. That, of course, was Blade Runner. Time will prove the critics just as wrong about this one.
As you no doubt know by now, this movie intercuts between six separate stories: three in the past, one in the present, two in the future. I don't know why anyone would find this confusing or hard to follow, though. All but one of the six stories is told strictly chronologically, and that one is still easy to follow because it begins with an interrogation and the rest of the story cuts between the interrogation and (the vast majority) the story being told to the interrogator.
Each of the stories packs an amazing amount into 25-30 minutes. The actors do uniformly terrific jobs of quickly establishing an emotional connection, so there's someone to care about in each one. Almost all contain thrills and excitement. One is very funny, in a wonderfully character-driven way. Some elicit tears of grief, some tears of joy, and none of it too predictably.
The switching between the stories is astonishingly effective; this is simply the best-edited movie I've ever seen. Even in the third act, when we're cutting between six different climaxes, there's not a moment where you feel taken out of the larger story by a less-than-perfect switch between two of the elements.
There are devices knitting the stories together explicitly, most notably the casting of actors in multiple roles and a birthmark that multiple characters have. You actually don't need to follow any of that on the first viewing, though. And that's because the stories overlap thematically.
STRUCTURE (not plot) SPOILER
The one thing I did get on the first viewing is that each story becomes a story in the next story chronologically. The protagonist of the 2nd story reads the published diary of the protagonist of the 1st. The 3rd story heroine comes into possession of and reads letters written by the 2nd story hero (which in fact tell the whole story). Her story is witnessed by a young boy who apparently grows up to be a thriller writer, and his novelization of those events is read by the protagonist of the 4th story, who is a publisher. He writes a memoir of his story, and it's turned into a film which is viewed by the characters in the 5th story. And the 5th story becomes very important in the 6th story in a way I won't divulge. (Furthermore, the sixth story is being told to others in a very brief framing story which doubles as the sixth story epilogue.)
END SPOILER
I'll be seeing this again in the theater and devouring the Blu-Ray when it's released. And right now my list-making brain is tentatively slotting it in as my 16th favorite movie of all time, after On the Waterfront, The Wizard of Oz and Dr. Strangelove, and ahead of Inception, Blade Runner, and The Seventh Seal. Yeah, it just may be that good.