Solid writeup. That left-sidebar clarification was smart to write, though I doubt anyone would mistake your position as anti-cinematic quality, exactly. The most unusual element of your taste in film — or at least my remotely-constructed image of your taste in film — is, as you lay out in the post, that success in one or two dimensions — here, "plot" and "the characters" — is a prerequisite for overall success. The majority of the critics/friends I read/talk to about this sort of thing seem to find that a film can succeed in one dimension to the relative exclusion of the others — just plot, just aesthetics, just character, just dialogue, whatever — and, if it's strong enough in its area of expertise, still come out a worthwhile whole. While I myself lean more toward that position and harbor something of a bias against the plottiest movies, I wouldn't say that one or the other way of viewing is correct.

Much of this likely boils down to a subject I'm quite interested in: the nature of the exchange between a work of art and its viewer/listener/reader and how it varies from mind to mind. It may well be that one man's ciphers are another's rich, engaging human beings, and thus some perceive a certain picture as actually succeeding on the character as well as the textural level while others think it pulls off only the latter. Some viewers' imaginations build whole worlds out of the sparsest of provided detail, even if the creator didn't intend it to be the tip of an iceberg.