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Harold Pinter's play Betrayal moves backwards in time, examining an extramarital affair from its end to its beginning. I believe Jeremy Irons stars in the film version. It works extremely well, but then, Pinter is damn good.
The book I'm writing now began with a non-linear narrative. My test readers didn't get it and were confused by what was going on, even though I felt I bent over backwards to make it clear what was happening "now" and what took place twenty years previously.
I decided to rewrite it in a linear form and made a discovery: the "now" story was feeble and couldn't stand on its own! I was just amusing myself with the structure and failed to tell a good story. So, now I'm in the middle of a page-one rewrite and complete rethinking of the concept.
Overall, I'd guess that more readers are turned off by non-linear storytelling than are excited by it, whereas everyone likes a well-told story that starts at the beginning, proceeds through the middle, and then stops at the end.
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