the film was "sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant", while also stating that it was "a singularly unpleasant movie" that had "scramble[d his] signals ... effectively, overriding deeply ingrained habits of response and judgment." Eric Kohn of Indiewire praised the film, writing that it was "a sheer delight of sarcasm and uneasy wit." Writing in The Village Voice, Nick Pinkerton described The Color Wheel as "a movie that's consistently unafraid to get confrontational and plain weird, with Colin's is-it-or-isn't-it-ironic racism, abrupt smothering close-ups, and scenes pushed past the boundaries of plausible motivation until they nosedive into absurdity. Like Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, it's a travelogue movie about a couple whose impossible, porcupine personalities leave them safe, finally, for nobody's company but each other's." In his personal blog, MSN film critic Glenn Kenny stated that "there's a sense in which the unpleasantness of the characters, all of the characters, is so oppressively overwhelming that one gets a sense of an Ionesco-style absurdism put into a contemporary hyperdrive, with a bit of sneering near-Letterist technical crudity thrown in. The effect, at certain other times, is of a Which Way to the Front?-era Jerry-Lewis-written-and-starring incest comedy directed by Carnival Of Souls''' Herk Harvey." David Edelstein of New York Magazine chose the film as a Critic's Pick, citing it as "the most entertaining unpleasant film I’ve seen in years." For a New York Times feature on the film, Cahiers du Cinéma editor Stéphane Delorme wrote that the film "reminds us of a New York independent cinema that we loved — black and white, shot on film, spontaneous, with funny and intelligent dialogue — and that seemed to no longer exist." Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe similarly praised the film, writing: "There aren’t enough of these truly independent movies anymore." A notable early champion of the film was critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who was the first to write about The Color Wheel during its festival run. Vishnevetsky wrote that, "despite (or maybe because of?) its detours into broad comedy, The Color Wheel manages to invest both characters with vulnerability, depth and even a perverse dignity; it's better at being a drama than most dramas." Reviewing the film in Variety, Ronnie Scheib wrote: "Hard to swallow but impossible to ignore, this nihilistic comedy may emerge as a cult touchstone." Other critics were not as impressed. Peter Keough of The Boston Phoenix gave the