The Color Wheel

Writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s sibling-rivalry screwball comedy/road movie is one neat, nasty achievement: a misanthropic, transgressive work of post-mumblecore cinema that double-dares you to like its obnoxious protagonists and keep pace with their rapid-fire Hawskian dialogue. Viewers have been simultaneously appalled and much impressed: “I hated every minute and was glued to my seat, unable to take my eyes from the screen,” wrote New York Times critic A. O. Scott, who ultimately found the film “sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant” — but only after seeing it a second time! Perry and co-writer Carlen Altman play Colin and JR, semi-estranged siblings. JR, a broadcasting student, has just parted ways with the professor she’s been sleeping with; Colin agrees to accompany her on a trip to retrieve her belongings. Their journey unfolds as an onslaught of caustic insults, withering sarcasm, and pent-up resentments zinging back-and-forth between two vitriolic souls. There are humiliating, often hilarious encounters with other people along the way, before a final act even more unsettling and unexpected than the rest of this audacious film. Perry has invoked an unholy trinity of Phillip Roth, Jerry Lewis, and Vincent Gallo to reference the self-loathing egomania on display; the monochrome images evoke the downbeat Americana of photographer Robert Frank. Voted “best undistributed film of 2011” in polls conducted by Indiewire and the Village Voice. B&W, 35mm. 83 mins.