movie reviews zola

If you were on Twitter on October 27, 2015, you probably became aware of an epic Twitter thread unfolding in real time, going viral at the speed of light. The thread was by a woman named A’Ziah King (aka “Zola”) and started with four pictures of Zola and another woman, preening for selfies, with the comment: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” She wasn’t kidding. Over the course of the next 148 Tweets, Zola recounted a tale of taking a spontaneous road trip to Florida with a woman named Jessica, hoping to get some lucrative stripping gigs. But then Zola found herself roped into a crazy whirl of sex work, pimps, guns, not to mention a dude falling off a balcony. The whole thing was a cliffhanger, with thousands of people waiting for the next “dispatch,” but why the thread really grabbed everybody’s attention was Zola’s voice . “I was like … I REALLY gotta go home y’all. Sorry to kill the mood but I cant take no more of this.” “I leave & go down to the pool. I mean, I am in Florida!” She is a born storyteller.

In what is probably a first, that Tweet thread has been adapted into a film, directed by Janicza Bravo , with script co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris (who wrote the Tony-nominated Slave Play ). The original thread unfolded with a propulsive and profane energy, gossipy and funny, even during the most terrifying chapters. There were disturbing undertones, mainly from Zola’s horror of being lured into a situation she hadn’t signed up for, but she zips onto the next thing, a wise-cracking survivor. “Zola” hews closely to the original thread (why fix what isn’t broke?), and often quotes it directly. But what Bravo has done that is most essential is capture the energy of Zola’s voice, and the unique qualities of her perspective. There are many things this tale is, but there are also many things this tale isn’t , and Bravo recognizes the distinction.

When Zola ( Taylour Paige ) meets Stefani ( Riley Keough ), while waiting on her at a sports bar (the original was a Hooters), there’s an instant connection. You could say that Stefani “love bombs” Zola, overwhelming her with compliments. Stefani is clearly a mess (later in the film, Zola yells at her: “YOUR BRAIN IS BROKE!”) and her exaggerated accent is put-on and culturally-appropriated in the extreme, but there is something irresistible about her too. When Stefani invites her to come to Florida for a good stripping gig, Zola thinks it might be fun, even though it’s a little early in their friendship to go on a “hoes trip”. However, when Stefani picks Zola up the next morning, Zola is dismayed to see two other people in the car, Stefani’s “roommate” known only as “X” ( Colman Domingo ) and Stefani’s hapless jealous boyfriend Derrick ( Nicholas Braun ). When Stefani admits to Zola that X “takes care” of her, Zola knows the score. He’s a pimp, and not only that, he plans to set them both to work the minute they hit Florida. The red flags were everywhere from the jump—watch the look on Paige’s expressive face when Stefani keeps calling her “sis”—but Zola figures she can handle it.

It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker doing what Bravo does with this material. Her style is very free, very open, while remaining specific and crystal-clear. (Seek out her first short film “Eat,” starring Brett Gelman and Katherine Waterston . It has everything: atmosphere, suspense, character development … and it’s only 14 minutes long. All of her short films are like this. Bravo emerged from “Eat” fully-formed as an artist.) Bravo perceives the dark undertones, but she also understands the initial exhilaration. This story needs both. There’s a sequence when they all jam out to Migos’ “Hannah Montana” in the car, shouting the lyrics in unison, filming each other, gyrating in their seats, exhilarated by the sun and sand and blue water zipping by outside, as they enter the freedom of anarchic anything-goes Florida. (This is then undercut by slow shots of what they see outside the windows: first, an enormous white cross free-standing on the road-side, then a Confederate flag at half-mast, billowing in the wind. Welcome to Florida.) Social media plays a key role in the narrative, and not just because the story originated there, but because of how the characters utilize it all along the way. The sound design reflects this reality, with phone-chirp alerts punctuating the action. There are other flourishes, but they’re used sparingly. Nothing clutters up the screen. Periodic freeze-frames give Zola a chance to interject her thoughts to us, her captive audience: “From here on out, watch every move this bitch make.”

Bravo’s sensitivity to atmosphere is everywhere apparent. A huge liquor store transforms into a surreal dreamspace, a posh hotel lobby echoes with an emptiness almost ominous, Zola, wearing a canary-yellow bikini, stands on a balcony, surrounded by the blue of night, a solitary lonely figure snatching some solitude from the craziness. There are repeat shots of dark highways, blurry stoplights, freeways and backroads, as the women are driven around Florida for their assignments, and these “road” sequences are lonely, painterly, beautiful. Zola is an experienced woman but there is an aspect to all of this reminiscent of Alice going through the looking glass. Mirrors dominate, and this is not just a facile symbolic nod, but a serious thematic choice. In one mirror sequence, the two women get ready together for their night out, putting on makeup side by side, as the mirrors proliferate their reflections, the two of them lost in a trance of self-absorption. (There’s a similar sequence in “ Scandal ,” the 1989 film about the Profumo affair, when Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and Bridget Fonda get themselves ready for a party, in a daze of autoeroticism.) There’s another sequence where Zola’s image is multiplied across the screen five times over, as she murmurs, “Who you gonna be tonight, Zola?” When Stefani interjects her own side of the story (as actually happened, the real-life counterpart taking to Reddit to defend herself), there’s an entire tonal shift, as well as a color-scheme shift: Stefani’s world is all pink-cupcake-hues, her braids now replaced by a “ Vertigo “-style updo, all classy and victimized, pulling white-woman rank on Zola, whom she claims got her into this mess.

Riley Keough is way, way out on a limb with her performance of this grotesque woman, a liar, a user, not in any way “likable” but with enough infectious charm it makes sense why Zola was initially seduced (because it was a seduction). Paige is the center of the film, though, and she holds it with a powerful grounded sense of her own worth and an insistence on remaining sane, despite the lunacy of everyone around her. Paige speaks worlds with her eyes, and it’s a joy to watch her change tack on a dime (see her quicksilver no-nonsense attitude when she realizes Stefani is being taken advantage of by X). Both Domingo and Braun give funny broad performances, and X’s intermittent African accent, which comes out only when he’s angry, is an ongoing joke.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of “Zola” is Bravo’s refusal to shy away from one of the most challenging qualities to portray in film (or anywhere else, for that matter, especially on social media): ambivalence. What is the film’s attitude towards the events onscreen? What is the film’s attitude towards sex work? Towards X? Towards Stefani? There are times when it seems cut-and dried. There are other times when it’s not so clear. The scenes of the two women stripping are luscious and playful, but then there’s the moment when a client tips Zola, murmuring that she looks like Whoopi Goldberg . The pleasure is real but so is the disgust. The sex work scenes have distressing elements, but they are also introduced by shots of a diverse array of penises. Heart emojis flower over the biggest specimen. It’s not that it’s complicated so much that it’s ambivalent. Ambivalence is such a common experience to most human beings, and yet it’s treated as a huge no-no in contemporary storytelling. People like their villains clear-cut and they like bad behavior to be signaled as “bad” with huge neon arrows. Bravo isn’t interested in that kind of simplified binary, and it’s the stronger film for it.

The only disappointment in all this dazzling creativity is that the ending feels almost cut off in mid-sentence. But that’s a quibble. This is the kind of film that tells its story well while simultaneously showing the joy of the creative act, in Bravo’s filmmaking, yes, but also in Zola’s decision to take to Twitter and tell her story in the first place. A voice like hers doesn’t come along every day.

In theaters now.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O’Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Taylour Paige as Zola
Riley Keough as Stefani
Colman Domingo as X
Nicholas Braun as Derrek
Ari’el Stachel as Sean
Jason Mitchell as Rival Hustler
Ts Madison as Hollywood
Megan Hayes as Joan
Tony Demil as Joe

Cinematographer

Writer (based on the tweets by).

A’Ziah King

Writer (based on the story by)

David Kushner
Janicza Bravo
Jeremy O. Harris
Joi McMillon

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Zola Reviews

What started as a Twitter thread so epic it earned the hashtag #TheStory has been transformed into a wild and woolly big-screen adaptation that not only honors its audacious social-media origin story but marks the breakthrough of a bold, fresh voice.

Full Review | Jul 29, 2024

“Zola” paints a postmodern version of Manet’s Olympia and her maid and the conflict of desire/attention.

Full Review | Jun 10, 2024

a mesmerizing stripper misadventure fever dream

Full Review | Aug 22, 2023

Zola is riveting, and the film’s rich array of cinematic techniques and performances upend convention, even if its narrative and story tend to falter.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

The discordant soundtrack, the eerie chirps of Zola’s iPhone, the ghost-like people repeating the same actions over and over again — make no mistake, this is a horror.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Zola is a transformative roller-coaster ride that is incredibly entertaining, energetic, and downright fascinating.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2023

At times it can stretch the limits of imagination... however, this is a film “based” on a Twitter thread and therefore must be taking at face value... So buy the ticket. Take the wild, wild ride.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Zola is the defining dark comedy of the digital age, thanks to Janicza Bravo’s daring direction and peerless performances from Taylour Paige and Riley Keough.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Turning tweets and piss into a must-see movie? That's cinematic alchemy.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2022

For most of its running time, Zola is as thrilling as any big-budget superhero epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 10, 2022

A slick, thoroughly contemporary crime dramedy that also isn’t afraid to get more than a little down and dirty.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 21, 2022

Like 2016s Spring Breakers, Zola begins to wear on your nerves as this wild ride goes to some dark places. However, strong performances and an assured director make this much more than Twitter titillation.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 3, 2022

After watching the film, you'll feel exhausted from its insane rollercoaster ride - a crazy weekend trip to Florida filled with unpredictable characters and bizarro turns, yet a disarming sense of humor about itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Paige and Keough are both stand-outs with how they handle the dramatic elements and the story's sense of humor. Even with its blemishes, Zola is wildly entertaining.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 12, 2022

How could you see Colman Domingo’s performance and not think, “This guy should be nominated for Best Supporting Actor?”

Full Review | Feb 9, 2022

Its fair to say that truth is often stranger than fiction. But Zola supposes that fiction can find greater truth yet.

Full Review | Feb 3, 2022

Doesn't know what to say about its crazy.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Jan 28, 2022

Janicza Bravo and her co-scenarist Jeremy O. Harris removed it from a trash fire and turned it into a stunning work, a savage, comic B-movie about a sane woman (Taylour Paige) in a hard world...

Full Review | Jan 18, 2022

Janicza Bravo's direction is fiery, confident, and funny, pushing her actors into places that verge on comedic parody but retain their humanity; never an easy trick.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2022

An undoubtedly attractive film in terms of staging, performances and some inspired sequences, but has been a bit overrated for my taste. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2022

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'Zola' Takes A Twitter Thread And Turns It Into A Fever Dream On Film

Aisha Harris

Taylour Paige stars as the on-screen incarnation of Zola. A24 Films hide caption

Taylour Paige stars as the on-screen incarnation of Zola.

There are eyes, and then there are Taylour Paige's eyes.

In Zola , a crackling, absurdist road trip movie inspired by a crackling, absurdist Twitter thread, the camera's gaze is frequently drawn to the bodily form – a stripper's smooth, exposed curves; a man's languid, exposed junk; lips being painted a deep cherry red; long, slender fingernails clinking against a window.

But then there are Paige's eyes, which convey more in a shift, squint, or roll than some performers can with their entire corporeal being. Those glances, those looks , are the delectable amuse-bouche in this feast of storytelling, and a grounding presence for the viewer amidst all the madness and weirdness that ultimately unfolds.

But hold up – insert brief freeze-frame here – allow me to back up and explain. In 2015, a Detroit waitress and exotic dancer named A'Ziah "Zola" King crafted a viral, vivid 148-tweet thread recounting a wild trip she took to Tampa, Fla. upon an invitation from Jessica, a white woman and fellow exotic dancer she'd known for exactly one day. The story involved a cast of indelible characters, including Jessica's pimp Z, a menacing dude who would suddenly possess an "African accent" during fits of rage, and Jessica's boyfriend Jarret, an awkward, pitiful guy who just wanted her to stop being a sex worker.

Yet Zola herself was undoubtedly the star of this story. From that very first opening line, accompanied by selfies of the author and Jessica together, it was obvious she has a bold personality and a spiky way with words: "Y'all wanna hear a story about why me and this b---- here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense."

And now Zola's comedy of errors has been dramatized for the screen, directed by Janicza Bravo, who co-wrote the script with Jeremy O. Harris. Their Zola wisely takes its cues from the source, hewing closely to the main plot twists and turns, sometimes quoting King's Tweets directly. Names have been changed: Jessica is now Stefani (Riley Keough), Z is now X (Colman Domingo) and Jarrett is now Derrek (Nicholas Braun). But these colorful characters build on the energy of that thread, playing even more vividly than you might have imagined them in your head.

Stefani is bombastic, spilling forth with an over-the-top "blaccent" – perhaps Keough is channeling Bhad Bhabie, the white rapper and celebrity who became known as the "Cash me outside" girl after an infamous appearance on Dr. Phil – that is at once inviting and ominous. From the get-go she seems suspect, a little too friendly and overly familiar when first encountering Zola, her waitress at a sports bar-type establishment. (Her first comment to Zola is an unfiltered compliment of her breasts.) And Zola herself seems wary of this whirlwind of a woman – again, it's all there in the eyes – but you can also see how someone like her might be seduced into traveling across the country with a complete stranger like Stefani, who promises a windfall of cash for a night or two of dancing at a club. It's because of the money, yes, but it's also because of the possibility for adventure.

Of course, if you recall the Tweets that started it all, you're aware Zola isn't so much seduced as she is bamboozled by Stefani, and once they've reached the south, things quickly go south. In the vein of plenty of movies set in Florida – especially Spring Breakers , another tale of young white women gone ratchet – there's always a sense that danger; the truly bizarre, or some combination of the two, is lurking around every corner. There's a surrealistic quality to the aesthetic, the camera's lens emitting a haze evoking both humidity and a dream-like state.

Stefani (Riley Keough) and Zola (Taylour Paige). Anna Kooris/A24 hide caption

Stefani (Riley Keough) and Zola (Taylour Paige).

Writer-director Janicza Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O. Harris find a distinct, playful rhythm in nearly every image, sound, and piece of dialogue. Text message exchanges don't appear onscreen as they would on a phone, but instead are spoken aloud by the actors in a borderline-mono-tone as they type and recite at the same time; it suggests the zombifying role technology plays in our lives even as it carves out more avenues for connection. As if mimicking re-tweet and share buttons, dialogue, imagery, and sounds are often repeated, layered side by side or intermittent. (One striking motif depicts Zola posing and preening in a hall of mirrors, her many reflections spanning the entire frame).

And as Paige's Zola narrates the adventure, she echoes the real-life Zola's written cadence, delivering some of the film's funniest moments as she reacts to her increasingly worrying surroundings. A movie like this could easily turn into a tale where the protagonist is merely a bystander along with the viewer, with everything happening to her and no sign of agency or personality in sight. But again, I come back to Paige's performance and how so much of it rides on what she does with those eyes, and not what she says. You know how there are some people who suck at making a poker face – the ones who just can't possibly suppress the expressions that stream across their face no matter how hard they try? That's Zola. During one of the movie's recurring freeze-frame moments, Zola advises us to "watch every move" Stefani makes going forward. The same should be stressed in regard to Zola, who seems to instinctively know when to sit back and observe, when to assert herself, and when she needs to be worried. It's all there on her face.

The real-life Zola was reportedly involved behind-the-scenes, approving the script and receiving an executive producing credit, a move that seems to have kept the film from the very real danger of being exploitative of King's story. It also helps that Bravo and Harris are an ideal match for this narrative, as both creators possess styles tending to revel in the discomforting and disorienting as a means of saying the quiet, horrifying parts people are not "supposed to" reveal out loud. (See Lemon , Bravo's subversive directorial debut interrogating an insidious brand of white male intellectualism; and Slave Play , Harris's polarizing, Tony-nominated Broadway debut bluntly confronting modern interracial relationships.)

These perspectives help bring Zola into a realm beyond clever Twitter adaptation, and center her point of view as an illustration of the precarity of existing as a Black woman in the world. When Zola does choose to assert herself and make her feelings known – "This is messy! You are messy!" – she's routinely dismissed and ignored by the others. It's an extreme representation of a common feeling many Black women have felt at one time or another: How you can be taken advantage of and told everything is fine when you know in your gut that it's not; can be told you're overreacting to something that's happening to you when you know you're supposed to feel this way. In fact, it's good and smart to feel this way, because that's how you preserve yourself. Zola's whirlwind dalliance with Stefani and her associates plays like a fever dream doubling as an allegory for gaslighting. It's a jolt when, at a pivotal point, she wonders aloud, "Who's looking out for me ?"

The third act stumbles a bit over typical third-act problems – how to maintain momentum and surprise after so much build amidst twists and turns? – and the ending feels to me a bit abrupt. But it's a small price to pay for entering this realm and experiencing it through Zola's eyes, in all its richness. It may have taken several years to shift from tweet to screen, but it's well worth the wait.

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“Zola,” Reviewed: A Twitter Thread Takes an Ingenious and Audacious Cinematic Form

Few movies as action-filled as Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” are directed with such a heightened and refined sense of style. In that respect, “Zola” is similar to the films of Wes Anderson , but Bravo outdoes even Anderson in one regard. For Anderson, style is a test of character—whereas for Bravo, who also puts her protagonist through severe tests, style extends into a vision of the storytelling process itself. As a title card near the beginning explains, “Zola” is based on a real-life, “mostly true” thread of a hundred and forty-eight tweets posted on October 27, 2015, by A’Ziah (Zola) King, and the film’s combination of unhinged action and rarefied realization brilliantly reflects its distinctive origin without mimicking it. The eponymous protagonist’s point of view is ingeniously embodied in the movie throughout (with one audacious exception). What’s all the more extraordinary is that, while constructing such a self-aware story, Bravo keeps the movie loose and free, jumpy and jazzy, filled with hip-hop and doo-wop, spangled with effects and with high-wattage acting. At the same time, she ardently and unflinchingly pursues a virtually documentary-like portrayal of the story’s surroundings. For all its exuberance and energy, the film is a horror story of deception, exploitation, and coercion.

The film begins with a baroque flourish, as two young women, one Black and one white, sit side by side in a lurid fluorescent glow before an intricate bank of mirrors that multiply their reflections vertiginously. As they languidly do their makeup in synchronized gestures, the Black woman, Zola (played by Taylour Paige), breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera with remarks that the white woman, Stefani (Riley Keough), apparently doesn’t hear: “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.” The rest of the film is a flashback from this opening scene, starting with the day that Zola and Stefani first meet, at the restaurant where Zola is working as a waitress—Zola is waiting on Stefani, who talks to her with rapid patter and rude candor (beginning with compliments about her “titties”). A quick series of decorative and rhapsodic scenes show the instant bonding of the two women, with special effects involving candy-colored fantasy interjections and subtitles. Both also pole dance, and, the very next day, Stefani invites Zola to come with her on a road trip to Tampa, where they can dance at a strip club for quick money, and Zola impetuously accepts.

The first sign of trouble comes as soon as Zola gets into the S.U.V. with Stefani, her boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and another man, the car’s driver (played by Colman Domingo), whom Stefani introduces as her roommate but is actually her pimp. Soon after the foursome get to Tampa, Zola discovers that the pimp has marketed both her and Stefani online as prostitutes; when Zola declares that she wants no part of it and tries to leave, he threatens her with violence. (It’s a spoiler to mention his name, which is only revealed late in the film; IMDb calls him “X.”) In the course of the action, Zola highlights X’s deceptions and Stefani’s own part in the ploy (though she may have been coerced by X to lure Zola in)—and Bravo, in a series of sharp, quick interventions, uses freeze-frames as devices to set up Zola’s retrospective first-person address to viewers, calling attention to the web of misdeeds in which she’s been caught. (Unlike many more ordinary movies that, in the interest of suspense, withhold from viewers what the protagonist knows, “Zola” calls viewers’ attention to crucial information that was withheld from her and makes clear what she learned and when she learned it.) Under pressure and in the face of danger, Zola discovers inner resources of courage and keenly practical insights (plus the boldness to put them into action) that both maintain her own boundaries and help Stefani liberate herself from X’s yoke.

The substance of “Zola” is fiercely earnest, the situations alternately depressing and bewildering and menacing, yet the tone of the movie remains predominantly bright and comedic. The antic drama bounces and swings with the hyperbolic energy of a tall tale, one that has grown giddy with wonder and whimsy from the sheer fact of Zola’s having lived to tell it. (The movie is largely factual, though the names of characters other than Zola have been changed; Bravo co-wrote the script with Jeremy O. Harris, and they also relied on a report by David Kushner, in Rolling Stone , about Zola and the experiences that she describes and also somewhat embellishes.) The movie is more than a coming-of-age story, in which Zola brilliantly and bravely improvises in the face of trouble—it’s also a coming-of-voice tale in which she discovers her creative identity by telling the story in the form of her Twitter thread. Zola’s speaking voice is sharply etched, logical, and decisive in her dialogue and in voice-over interjections; her narrative voice gets an even keener cinematic embodiment in the styles and the details of the movie’s images, sounds, and, for that matter, performances.

Bravo relies on extended and often symmetrical takes, not with the geometrical severity of Anderson’s compositions but looser, with a hint of spontaneous discovery and its built-in imbalance. She emphasizes the graphic side of gestures and poses, movement and mounting tension, at a distance, along with the space-filling power of the actors’ presences and distinctively heightened vocal inflections. She delights in the expressively ornamental, as in a scene of wondrous, imaginative simplicity in which the foursome emerge from the car in the parking lot of a depressingly dingy motel. Two kids are playing basketball there, on the building’s second-floor walkway, and the ball’s bounces, obsessively repeating the pattern of two with a pause, serve as the scene’s on-camera music score, trouncing the power of any song that might have been overlaid on the soundtrack.

“Zola” is in part a road-trip movie, and Bravo thrills to the sheer sight of the road, and captures the curiosity and the suspense of travel. Yet some of the sights seen along the way offer far more than local color, as when the travellers are approaching Tampa, and Zola, looking out the window, sees a big Confederate flag flying roadside (and Bravo holds on to that image at rueful length, panning to follow it out the rear window). Later, in Tampa, during a dour trip to some dubious johns, Zola, Stefani, and Derrek all see a police siren far down the road, and the sound of the encounter—officers brutalizing and Tasering a man on the ground who is begging for mercy and crying for help—dominates the soundtrack for a long time, as the S.U.V. approaches and Bravo keeps the camera staring hard at the attack, once again panning as they approach and holding the sight onscreen through the vehicle’s rear window for an agonizingly long time.

What follows is another scene of violence—the violence of predatory men inflicted on women—which is the ambient constant of “Zola.” It’s here that Bravo delivers her most extreme, most daring, most scathingly sardonic vision of the world of sex work. As Zola tries to extricate herself from X’s coercion and to help Stefani benefit from it in ways that X would never allow, a montage shows the johns’ flabby bodies and stubby penises, the desperate heavings in pursuit of pleasure, and the grotesqueries of sex-faces, in a series of vertically sliding images, separated by black lines, that suggest a live-action parody of the erstwhile instructional medium of the filmstrip. It’s a vision of rubes overpaying grossly for a groaning but underpaying for what it costs the women who provide it. In an appalling scene of menacing violence, Zola becomes sharply aware of Stefani’s sufferings, and Bravo both finds an understatedly anguished visual correlate for the shattering moment and makes it the dramatic pivot for a dazzling sequence in which Stefani tells her own side of the story, hyperbolically, insultingly, with racist undertones—and yet with a desperate pathos that Bravo doesn’t miss. It’s Stefani’s effort to recover her own story and her own agency in the face of brutal dependency, gaslighting, and fear.

Race is a crucial part of “Zola,” in surprising and revealing ways. As much as Bravo finds joy in the display of extravagant acting, and in the characters’ exaggerated behavior and loopy mannerisms, she also subjects these flamboyant excesses to severe, insightful scrutiny. Zola’s exemplary gesture is the embittered glower of disappointment with those who surround her, and Paige radiantly conveys her dynamic thoughts in concentrated repose, giving Zola a trenchant, plain, and affirmative voice that cuts through the tangle of deceptions, a focussed gaze that takes in all the idiosyncratic, implausible, infinitesimal details that she’ll eventually bring to light. As played by Domingo, X is a master manipulator whose scheming extends to his very identity and gives rise to a weird, memorable stray moment (one of many), when his name is finally heard, and he forces his unwilling minions to chant it chorally. Braun’s reedy, uninflected voice meets at the crossroads of Nicolas Cage and Michael Cera, and he brings real poignance and physical comedy to the blundering ignorance of his puppy-like, uninhibitedly frenzied affection. Stefani, in her traumatized exuberance, her victimized victimizing, speaks in a seemingly unintentional series of stereotypes of Black English, and her mannerisms, which fly from the start like a red flag, convince Zola of a kinship that instead proves treacherous.

Zola doesn’t say a word about Stefani’s dubious appropriation; she expresses exasperation early on and then merely becomes inured to it. Yet the very substance of the film, filtered through Zola’s perceptions, indicates a dismay that becomes increasingly tolerant and loses its judgmental edge as she observes the cruel servitude to which Stefani is subjected. With its hectic action and interventionist effects, its frenzied performances and behavioral quirks, the luridly exuberant design and the coolly analytical hum of its incisive images, “Zola” is, from start to finish, both a teeming refraction of a single mind in overdrive and a sharply discerning vision of a world grasped under pressure. The movie exemplifies the power of the cinema—even the popular and commercial and invigoratingly swingy cinema—to reflect the inner life through imaginative methods that, at the same time, reveal the fractures and complexities of public life with probing and passionate insight.

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Zola Is a Saga Where a Savvy, Black Stripper Holds All the Power

Janicza Bravo's provocative new film, based on an infamous 2015 Twitter thread by A’Ziah “Zola” King, unpacks sex work, personal agency, and Black womanhood.

riley keough left stars as "stefani" and taylour paige right stars as "zola" in director janicza bravo's zola, an a24 films release cr anna kooris a24 films

Spoilers ahead.

The postponed and much-awaited comedy-drama Zola has finally arrived like a prettily packaged gift with scented tissue paper. Only that gift actually contains a grenade inside. What starts out as a tale of two beautiful young strippers—Zola, played by Taylour Paige ( Boogie, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ), and Stefani, played by Riley Keough ( The Lodge, The Devil All the Time )—embarking on a road trip to dance in Florida quickly evolves into a messy, mayhem-filled, murderous 48-eight hour ordeal. Releasing June 30, Zola , directed by Janicza Bravo (Lemon ) and co-written with the lauded playwright Jeremy O. Harris ( Slave Play ), will soon be enshrined as a social media-age cult classic. It’s the first film to be adapted from a series of tweets—148, to be exact—posted by the real Zola, A’Ziah “Zola” King , in October 2015. In what’s now considered to be the first-ever Twitter thread, King narrated her viral and wildly entertaining “hoe trip” with a fellow white exotic dancer named Jessica, whom she met months prior. Stars like Solange, Missy Elliott, and Ava DuVernay praised King’s storytelling . Black Twitter minted it the "Thotyssey,” likening King to a Black millennial Homer for her witty and epic prose.

Bravo transforms that prose into an addictive cinematic experience that harnesses glamour, sex trafficking, Internet culture, race, and megalomania. The feature kicks off at a Hooters in Detroit, where Zola waits on Stefani and a friend. They quickly chat each other up (“vibing over our hoeism,” as King said in her Twitter thread), bond over their exotic dancing experiences, and exchange numbers. The next day Stefani invites Zola on a weekend dancing trip to Florida to make five grand a night. Zola agrees only after pressing Stefani on who else is joining and discovering that Stefani’s bumbling and neglected white boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun, Succession ), and a mysterious Black roommate who goes by X (Colman Domingo, Candyman ) will also be along for the ride. During the drive down, they pass Confederate flags and “Jesus Saves” signs, and gleefully sing along to Migos’s “Hannah Montana .” They arrive at a janky motel room in Tampa, and Derrek stays behind while X takes them to the strip club. The girls dance but pull in little money, with Stefani warning Zola that X will ask how much they made.

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Realizing that she's been duped by Stefani, Zola comes to understand that she and Stefani are not really there to dance but to “trap”—have sex with men—while being coerced by X, who’s really Stefani’s Nigerian pimp. The innocent selfies Zola took with Stefani in the strip club were sneakily posted on the sex site Backpage. Zola cringes with clear discomfort and grapples with knowing that she has entered an incredibly violent space rife with misogynoir. One of her many survival mechanisms when finding herself in tense moments is answering in monosyllabic statements like, “Word.” But Zola’s wit and whip-smart intuition carry her through this traumatic two-day debacle. When X drives the women to an upscale hotel for the clients he’s lined up for Stefani, it’s Zola who elevates her sexual worth in bed. “Pussy is worth thousands!” she says before increasing Stefani’s rate from $100 to $500 on Backpage with a burner phone. By the end of the night, the pair make eight grand.

Zola’s wit and whip-smart intuition carry her through this traumatic two-day debacle.

Zola is darker and more sadistic than the glossy Hustlers (2019), but sits in its own lane. It’s adjacent to the Starz series P-Valley (2020). Helmed by Katori Hall , the cable series showcases the richness and complexities of Southern Black women and femmes in stripper culture. We see this parallel in one hilarious moment when Zola and Stefani arrive at the strip club in Tampa, and reality TV star and activist Ts Madison leads the dancers in a prayer circle, begging God to “send us n****s with culture and good credit!” Bravo envisioned Zola existing in a space where “'Bodak Yellow' and Blue Velvet meet.” The visionary filmmaker compared Zola’s frenetic pace to that of Hieronymus Bosch’s disturbing masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights . The triptych’s panels illustrate a scene that shifts from celestial paradise to sexual debauchery to human degradation. Similarly, Zola starts with a casual encounter between two young exotic dancers, unfurls into sexual labor, and then descends into rival pimps, guns, and physical violence against women.

There is an abundance of care present in Zola, which Bravo exercises throughout the entire film. A care for women’s bodies, intimate gestures, fabulous outfits, and female friendships, even when those friendships fracture. Despite the sex work Stefani performs, there is no female nudity in the film, only a comical montage of penises in an array of varying shapes and sizes. As a Black woman director, the Afro-Panamanian American Bravo demonstrates specific care with how she represents Black women’s bodies. Paige’s brown skin glows; it’s luminous and shimmery under the soft and glam lighting, her long feline-like body mesmerizing as she glides up and down the pole. (Paige has a classical dance background but trained undercover at Crazy Girls in L.A. for three weeks.) Bravo executes dreamy little sequences against mirrored walls where Zola fantasizes different personae for herself: a Hooters waitress, a Playboy Bunny, a sex goddess twerking in an assless catsuit. The kaleidoscopic visuals leave you swooning.

It’s wonderful to see Paige flourish under a Black woman’s direction (her first lead in a feature was in Stella Meghie’s indie Jamaican-American family drama, Jean of the Joneses ). The trust, the risk taking, the boundary pushing, it’s all there on-screen to be fully taken in, frame by frame. Derica Cole Washington , Zola ’s costume designer, possesses a dazzling eye, dressing both actresses in a series of pastel-colored minidresses and shiny, skimpy fits. Even Domingo, who plays the sinister and repugnant X, looks dapper as hell in his silk shirts, linen pants, and flashy rattlesnake shoes.

There is also special care taken with the portrayal of Stefani, who is a deceitful and treacherous lying white woman. She displays zero guilt over fooling Zola about dancing in Tampa (turns out she’s tricked women before), feigns fragility, and cries white woman tears to evade any culpability. Stefani speaks in a Southern Blaccent, wears cornrows, gels down her baby hairs, and describes a Black woman with phrases such as, “This bitch with a nappy-ass head was up in my face!” She thoroughly humiliates her bipolar and suicidal boyfriend, Derrek, with every opportunity she gets. In a brief, genius scene, Stefani tells her side of the saga, presenting herself as a faultless, God-fearing Christian in a carnation-pink skirt suit who goes on a crude, racist tirade about Zola’s appearance and cleanliness. Yet, as awful as Stefani is, it's heartbreaking to see the harrowing pitfalls of sexual exploitation that she endures. She is unable to keep a single dollar of her hard-earned money to feed her own daughter, because X cruelly reminds her that her hair extensions, nails, and clothing—which he pays for—are expensive. When Zola and Stefani knock on a hotel door in Tampa, Stefani is abruptly snatched up by two burly men and later found slumped over in a closet with a bloody lip.

James Franco was originally attached to coproduce and direct this film, along with two white male screenwriters, which would surely have smelled of Spring Breakers (2012). I can only imagine the kind of fratty, douchey, racist, and misogynistic 90-minute spectacle Zola could’ve been under Franco’s guidance. In Bravo’s Zola, Paige steps into King’s shoes truthfully, (King once told Paige, “You’re so me it hurts”), from her high ponytail and hoops down to her towering stripper heels. Zola’s voice is centered and prioritized. Despite Zola entering a physically harmful and sexually violent space, she continues to exercise personal agency and practices the power of “no” over and over again.

When X arrives at a Tampa hotel to confront rival pimps who have abducted Stefani, he admonishes Zola, “You’re supposed to be looking out for her!” She replies succinctly, “Who’s looking out for me?”

Jasmin Hernandez is a Black Dominican Yorker based in Harlem, New York. She is an author and founder of Gallery Gurls , which reps for BIPOC in the art world.

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<i>Zola</i> Is a Wild Road Trip Movie That Works Against All Odds

Zola Is a Wild Road Trip Movie That Works Against All Odds

B ecause humankind will never stop inventing new forms for old stories, it was only a matter of time before we got a movie adapted from a Twitter thread . In Zola, directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo , a young waitstaffer at a Hooters-style restaurant makes a new friend who cajoles her into taking a weekend road trip to Florida. The goal is to make some quick money dancing at strip clubs, which seems forthright enough. But the ensuing adventure involves guns, sex work, a menacing pimp and a lovelorn boyfriend’s suicide attempt. And all of it really happened—or sort of happened—as recorded by a young woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King in a series of 148 tweets posted in October 2015. Each installment was a nail-biter rendered in 140 characters or less. Unsurprisingly, this prose poem of stripper life went viral.

With Zola, Bravo captures the brashness of King’s voice and turns it into a movie that works against all odds, a black comedy and crime drama that begins as a strippers’ lark and evolves into a NSFW saga of violence and sex trafficking. But Zola is also a story about platonic attraction between women. Sometimes we befriend women who are all wrong for us. We’re as susceptible to feminine magnetism as men are, even if the game doesn’t end in bed.

You can almost hear the click when Zola (Taylour Paige, recently seen in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ) and Stefani ( Riley Keough ) meet in that restaurant: Stefani appraises Zola—and her winsome cleavage—with her hard little kitty-cat eyes. She’s both predatory and alluring, and Zola senses that she might be trouble. But who isn’t occasionally seduced by the thrill of the new? When Stefani, her hapless boyfriend Derrek ( Nicholas Braun ) and her so-called roommate (Colman Domingo) swing by Zola’s apartment to pick her up, she steps out to meet them, her stripper garb packed into neat, sensible little tote bags. She wears a satin baseball jacket over a tiny shorts outfit—she could almost be ready for church, if she just put on a longer skirt. Stefani, meanwhile, is all saucer-size hoop earrings and glitter eye shadow, a trailer-park siren who swears that everything she does is for her baby, an infant who may or may not exist.

Zola quickly susses out that Stefani’s “roommate” is really her pimp, and he plans to put the two women on the market together. Zola nixes that idea quickly, but she also gives Stefani some tips on how she can make more money from turning tricks. More enduring friendships have been built on less.

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Zola, review: A whirlwind of sex, violence and deceit

This bold adaptation of a viral twitter story proves that social media has wrecked the boundaries between fact and fiction, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Janicza Bravo. Starring: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, Ari’el Stachel, Colman Domingo. 18, 90 mins.

Zola is about as modern as film-making gets. It takes its inspiration from a series of tweets posted by Detroit-based exotic dancer A’Ziah “Zola” King in 2015, now considered a masterclass in digital storytelling. King opened with a tantalising promise: “You wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”

And, in the next 147 tweets, she delivered pure chaos. A trip to Florida with a woman named Jessica she’d barely met – on the promise of making some extra cash stripping in a few Tampa clubs – unravelled into a full-blown carnival of sex, violence, deceit and mortifying incompetence. King was pithy, observant; she knew how to build characters from the simplest of details. Later, she admitted to inventing several crucial plot points. It never mattered much. Social media has wrecked the boundaries between fact and fiction – all that matters now is the story.

Film-maker Janicza Bravo and co-writer Jeremy O Harris have now used those same tweets to create their own whirlwind of a film. Bold and intricate in its construction, it possesses the same consciously offhand manner of someone typing in 140-character chunks. Its soundtrack not only consists of Mica Levi’s haunting melodies, but also a Greek chorus of chirping Twitter notifications. The film instantly shakes off the story’s grip on reality by playing around with the names – Zola is only ever Zola (Taylour Paige), Jessica is now Stefani (Riley Keough). Her roommate who turns out to be much more than a roommate is no longer Z, but X (Colman Domingo), while her boyfriend Jarrett becomes Derrek ( Succession ’s Nicholas Braun).

Bravo seems well-versed in the new, bifurcated state of being brought on by social media – one where life isn’t just something to be experienced, but to be simultaneously observed so that it can later be regurgitated for a hungry, ever-present audience. Zola will direct punchlines into the camera (“They start f***ing. It was gross”) like an arrow meeting its bullseye. She’ll languidly admire herself in a wall of mirrors, asking herself, “Who you gonna be tonight, Zola?”

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But the other Zola – the more truthful, vulnerable one – is occasionally glimpsed in the corner of a frame, her arms spread across her body as a shield. At one point, she seems to completely disassociate, the screen replaced with rainbow-hued electric sparks, after things reach the point of simply becoming too “real”. These challenges to Zola’s otherwise carefully manicured artifice simply wouldn’t work without the microscopic precision of Paige’s performance, where monologues are spoken through the arch of an eyebrow or a single, toneless response of “word”.

Keough’s turn, meanwhile, is a feat of both bravado and care – there’s a laudable shrewdness in how she’s reinvested her status as Elvis’s granddaughter into such a fascinating portrait of blithe white privilege as Stefani, just as she did in 2017’s American Honey. Domingo brings both charm and terror; Braun is the ideal wet noodle. All of these characters feel both unbelievable and unnervingly recognisable, even as they act out against a backdrop of penis montages and singalongs to Migos’s “Hannah Montana”. But, as Zola argues, that’s where all the best stories lie.

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 2 Reviews
Kids Say 4 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Sex-trafficked stripper takes a wild, glamorized road trip.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 16+?

Frequent lower-body male nudity (including both a montage of genitals and full-b

Frequent gun use. One character has blood pooling from his neck. An attempted su

Frequent use of "bitch," "f--k," "s--t," and the "N" word.

Adult alcohol use.

Any Positive Content?

While there's a positive message about resilience in the face of adversity, the

Characters lie, manipulate, inflict harm, and betray their own self interest in

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Frequent lower-body male nudity (including both a montage of genitals and full-body nudity). Sex with writhing and moaning. Exotic dancers wear revealing clothes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Frequent gun use. One character has blood pooling from his neck. An attempted suicide, during which a character is shown throwing himself off a balcony, lying lifeless, with a bloody head wound. Kidnapping, human trafficking, and sexual assault.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

While there's a positive message about resilience in the face of adversity, the movie's overwhelming theme is interpersonal violence.

Positive Role Models

Characters lie, manipulate, inflict harm, and betray their own self interest in order to make money. Main character Zola is a former stripper who uses sex to manipulate her boyfriend into supporting her decision to dance again. Stefani, another stripper who befriends Zola, uses force, fraud, and coercion to lure Zola into a sex-trafficking trap.

Parents need to know that Zola is a dramedy inspired by real-life tweets about a sex-trafficked exotic dancer, told as a glamorized, comedic road-trip movie. It follows Zola ( Taylour Paige ), a former stripper who decides to dance again when she's invited to a lucrative Florida strip club by new friend Stefani ( Riley Keough ). But once they're on the road, Zola is forced into sex work she didn't sign up for. Mature content includes frequent use of the the "N" word, plus "bitch," "f--k," and "s--t." There's also gun violence, sexual assault, kidnapping, and attempted suicide, as well as depictions of sex work, pole dancing, and lower-body male nudity (including a montage of genitals). While you can argue that it offers positive messages on resilience in the face of adversity, that adversity is trivialized through the movie's glamorized, comedic tone. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (2)
Kids say (4)

Based on 2 parent reviews

"A" game character portrayals of a wild ride of a road trip!

Unnecessary visuals of complex sexual situations, what's the story.

In ZOLA, former strippers Zola ( Taylour Paige ) becomes fast friends with Stefani ( Riley Keough ), who invites her to come on a road trip to a lucrative strip club in Florida. On the drive, they're joined by Stefani's boyfriend and a man who "takes care" of Stefani named Johnathan (Nasir Rahim). Stefani proceeds to post photos of her and Zola on an escort website without Zola's consent. Zola tries to escape but is threatened by Johnathan and forced into looking after Stefani while she works. When Zola realizes how little Stefani charges, she ups her rate on the website and takes a cut of the earnings. Later, the group members are robbed, and Zola is sexually assaulted -- which is facilitated by Johnathan as a ploy for their escape. But can she make it home?

Is It Any Good?

There's something refreshing about a story centering the experience of a Black stripper that's not about moral failure, tragic origin stories, or being "saved." Zola is a character whose story is too often marginalized; women like her are rarely intended for audiences to care about or empathize with.

Zola , it seems, is a movie that wants to change that. But it does so by glamorizing the non-consensual situations Zola finds herself in -- sex trafficking, kidnapping, gun violence. Zola and Stefani are shown perfectly coiffed, fashionably styled, and sometimes exhibiting Kardashian-level calmness as they navigate serious situations. Zola has the difficult task of striking a delicate tonal balance between not victimizing its main character while also not trivializing her experiences, particularly when many of her experiences are steeped in the discriminatory and violent behavior historically inflicted upon Black women.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Zola handles the topic of sex trafficking. Do you think it's realistic? Glamorized? Why might filmmakers choose to glamorize something that's so tragic in real life?

Would you characterize Zola as a comedy? Why, or why not?

What role does friendship play in Zola ?

What does sex mean to the movie's characters? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding sex and relationships.

Movie Details

In theaters : June 30, 2021
On DVD or streaming : July 21, 2021
Cast : Taylour Paige , Riley Keough , Nicholas Braun
Director : Janicza Bravo
Inclusion Information : Black directors, Latino directors, Female actors, Black actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 86 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong sexual content and language throughout, graphic nudity, and violence including a sexual assault
Last updated : October 22, 2023

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Zola Review

06 Aug 2021

In 2015, A’ziah ‘Zola’ King fired out a 148-tweet thread about her messy weekend in Florida and Hollywood was clamouring for it. “Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out?” King’s opening tweet declared. “It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.” At 90 minutes, the film adaptation is a reasonable length, but co-writer and director Janicza Bravo uses much style and intrigue to serve up an unreliable narrator for the social media age.

The sensational embellishments of #TheStory recommended itself to the surrealist approach of Bravo, which she employed for her 2017 feature debut Lemon and again for this fever-dream escapade exposing the darker corners of US life. For as much as this is a black comedy designed to amuse and titillate, it is also a damning indictment of a society that frequently leaves women at the mercy of the whims of disreputable men.

An impactful cast maintain the film’s frenetic pace.

The film opens like a romantic fantasy. Composer Mica Levi’s fluttering harp motif evokes a butterfly-in-your-belly feel as two women fall hard for each other after a chance encounter. It’s not a sexual coupling: when Zola (Taylour Paige) meets Stefani ( Riley Keough ) at her restaurant day job, it’s clear their relationship is a sisterly connection, forged during an evening of stripping at a local club and sealed through Stefani’s repeated exclamations of “sis!” as they girl-talk into the early hours. Their language uses African-American Vernacular English that could only be articulated by writers authentically engaged in the culture. Playwright Jeremy O. Harris and Bravo fill out Zola’s story with their own whip-smart dialogue while incorporating lines from the original thread like one kinetic texting montage, peppered with smartphone swooshes and ‘ding dings’. Zola tells her new friend she would have to “fuck her man calm” in order to ease his mind before they head off on their stripping adventure, and it quickly segues into the intimate act to comic effect.

Sex is very much on the movie’s mind, but while moments on the pole visualise the women as beauteous, a striking montage of Stefani flitting between male customers thrums with farcical urgency as the romance of this weekend quickly wears off.

It’s through Zola’s eyes that we understand the increasingly fraught state of events, and where the narration might lack a deeper introspection of her motivations, Paige’s quizzical side-looks, acrylic-nailed pointing and defiant body language help to fill in the gaps. Keough, meanwhile, delivers her Blaccented honey trapper with gusto, adding countering moments of vulnerability to demand sympathy for a woman who, for all her culturally appropriating faults, is still a victim. Throw in Colman Domingo ’s manipulative, code-switching pimp and Nicholas Braun ’s reliability as the idiotic cuckold, and you’ve got an impactful cast maintaining the film’s frenetic pace. But as the weekend comes to a close, only a few meagre narrative threads remain, allowing the once pure-fire emoji of Zola’s journey to fizzle out.

Movies | 17 12 2021

Entertainment

Trust Me, Zola Might Just Be the Wittiest and Wildest Movie of 2021

If you don't already have plans to see Zola , this is your sign to make some. Based on the infamous 148-tweet thread , the film follows a Detroit waitress as she gets swept up in what becomes one of the wildest moments of her life thanks to a sex worker named Stefani and her pimp/"roommate," X. It also features Taylour Paige (Zola), Riley Keough (Stefani), Nicholas Braun (Derrek), and Colman Domingo (X) in some of the best work of their careers. While I was ready for a wild ride, I wasn't ready for a film that includes nuanced references to police brutality and right-wing Christian propaganda while telling a story that's witty, intelligent, and at times, dark. I've only seen one movie in theaters this year, and I'm glad it was Zola . If my testimony hasn't already sold you on watching the film, ahead are five of Zola 's wildest moments.

When Zola Realizes She Probably Shouldn't Have Gone on the Trip

While taking a trip with a stranger doesn't seem like something I'd ever do, the film makes it easy to see why Zola was on board with Stefani's initial plan. After all, who wouldn't want to make an easy $5,000 over a weekend? Paige's enigmatic portrayal of the titular character had me laughing, cringing, and wondering just how the f*ck she was going to make it out of her situation — even though I'd already read the initial 148-tweet thread.

Every reaction from Ts Madison's prayer for "dick" and "good credit" to watching Derrek try to interject himself into Stefani's borderline culturally appropriative story, my eyes couldn't leave Paige. I was really hooked when after the impromptu Migos sing-along, Zola just looks at her companions with wide-eyed regret. My own wide-eyed regret came after watching a parade of penises during Zola and Stefani's first hotel stay. As Zola so accurately puts it, "They started f*cking. It was gross."

When Derrek Is Allowed to Speak

I'm not going to lie: I'm not even 100 percent sure that Braun was even acting in this movie. Interestingly enough, if Derrek hadn't been included on the trip, maybe things would've worked out better for Zola and crew. It is his new friend that leads to potentially dangerous circumstances. However, nearly every time Braun speaks in character, I found myself literally laughing out loud. There's just something about the way he says "It kind of is though" to a terrible motel room and "That's not you man" to the betrayal of his Tampa buddy . Just imagine any white man ever that's tested your patience with his stupid little videos and endless questions. That's pretty much Derrek.

When Zola and Stefani's Connection Begins to Slowly Unravel

The subtitles for a short conversation between Zola and Stefani was a genius inclusion by Janicza Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris. It truly shows the magnetic connection between the two women. However, as Zola realizes that the woman she's chosen to go on a "hoe trip" with is "messier" than she could have ever expected, things start to get a bit complicated.

As Stefani begins to show her true colors, Zola figures she just needs to do whatever she can to survive the weekend. If the differences between the two weren't already clear enough, the film gives little nods to their different standards of living, including the juxtaposition between Zola's neat apartment and Stefani's chaotic living room and the bathroom scene, where Zola has clearly been drinking more water than Stefani.

When the Movie Takes a Short Tangent to Explore "@Stefani"

Much like when Jess supposedly shared her side of the story on Reddit back in 2015, Zola allows their version to tell hers. To tell this story, Stefani drops her blaccent while portraying Zola as a racist caricature. Making claims that Zola is a "jealous b*tch" and that Stefani never would've "trapped" because she's a "Christian," her account is all over the place. Luckily, her ridiculous story doesn't last long because we do not need to know what Stefani thinks. Keough, on the other hand, did a great job of making you hate Stefani just as much as Zola does by the end of the movie.

When Colman Domingo's X Makes Demands

Domingo absolutely understood the assignment when it came to portraying his frightening Zola character . I was almost as shocked as Zola is when his character, X, switches from an American accent to a Nigerian one when threatened. It truly shows that Zola has no idea who she is dealing with, and that if she wants to survive the weekend, she has to do what he says.

The circumstances he puts Zola, Stefani, and even, to an extent, his fiancée and Derrek in, are wildly dangerous with extremely high stakes. Am I glad that he was able to get Stefani away from Derrek's magic Tampa friend? Yes, because Zola does not deserve that sh*t. His laissez-faire attitude also brings about a few of the film's more memorable quotes, including the "delusions of gander" Derrek's Tampa buddy has as he begins trying to intimidate X.

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‘Zola’ Review: Janicza Bravo’s Tweetstorm Tornado

Virtuoso filmmaking and a pair of killer performances can't transform this wild-and-crazy escapade, in which a stripper and a prostitute wind up in over their heads, into the stuff of art.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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As Twitter is to great literature, “ Zola ” is to the cinematic masterpieces that have come before: It’s superficial and relatively thin on substance, but a whole lot shorter and funnier than, say, “Anna Karenina” or “La Comédie Humaine” — although the latter might have been a good alternate title for this hyper-stylized lowbrow satire, in which “Lemon” director Janicza Bravo turns a whirlwind weekend of sun, fun and sex work into a statement on self-respect and recognizing one’s own worth.

Rowdier than “Hustlers” and “The Florida Project” put together, but hailing from a similar place of for-hire female empowerment, “Zola” is an irreverent, sensibility-offending trip for audiences — a good many of whom may be shocked to their core — and a showcase for leading ladies Taylour Paige (in the title role) and Riley Keough (of “The Girlfriend Experience”), playing the stripper who tries to lead her astray. Inspired by an epic tweetstorm — a flurry of some 140 posts, blasted out by A’Ziah King, aka “zolarmoon,” punched up with ampersands and all-caps and more expletives than a 50 Cent song — that became a viral sensation that became a Rolling Stone story that somehow got optioned for the big screen, “Zola” lays waste to good taste as it recounts a crazy road trip in which two gals head from Detroit to Florida and shit goes south.

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The real-life Zola worked in a Hooters restaurant, though the name of the joint’s been changed, as have most of the characters’. “This white bitch” (rechristened “Stefani” here) came in as a customer, probably fishing for a wing-woman to accompany her to Tampa, where her pimp planned to make a few thou. But Stefani didn’t pitch the adventure quite like that. She said there was a chance for them to get rich dancing at a bougie strip club, and Zola fell for it.

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Most likely in reference to the story’s social-media origins, a digital tweeting noise pings every so often (punctuating composer Mica Levi’s characteristically abstract, already synthesized soundscape) as if to underscore the details that were true — or else, backed by what Zola had shared on social media. Paige plays Zola with a fair sense of skepticism, pantomiming her discomfort/distrust every time she cuts her eyes or gives Stefani a glance that says, “Does it look like I was born yesterday?” Whether you call it spontaneous or naive, if the offer had been a good idea, we wouldn’t be talking about it today.

So the two women drive down, chauffeured by an ominous dude (Colman Domingo, credited as “X”), who turns out to be Stefani’s pimp, and her boyfriend “Derrek” (Nicholas Braun), an all-but-braindead enabler who keeps insisting that, whatever their arrangement, Stefani had agreed to stop prostituting herself. Zola grows increasingly wary and annoyed as she realizes the caliber of screw-ups she’s traveling with, and Keough does a masterful job of chipping away at the whatever-you-call-the-opposite-of-bromance established in the movie’s giddy opening few scenes.

Whereas sex-positive Zola seems to have a relatively healthy handle on her boundaries, as well as an understanding bae back at home, Stefani isn’t nearly as stable. Keep in mind, however, that this is how Zola describes her, further distorted by Bravo and “Slave Play”-wright Jeremy O. Harris ’ borderline-slanderous screenplay. After a demeaning night at the strip club, the two women wind up back in X’s SUV, where he informs them, with a sense of menace that cuts through the film’s otherwise-carefree tone, that he’s placed a listing on now-defunct sex-trafficking site Backpage.

From here on, “Zola” starts to feel like that long, tense sequence in the back half of “Boogie Nights” based on the Wonderland murders. Guns are involved, someone gets shot and Bravo — who, working with DP Ari Wegner, adopts a virtual arm’s-length distance from her super-saturated, larger-than-life subjects — shoves our faces in the less-glamorous side of sex work. In one scene, trapped in the hotel room where X expects them to turn tricks all night, Zola averts her eyes, but the camera lingers on what Stefani’s doing, showing a procession of partners of widely varying hygiene, age and endowment.

If that montage doesn’t earn the film an NC-17 rating, then there’s an even more troubling sequence later on, in which the two girls are forced to navigate a gang bang. “We’re not proper,” one of the boxers-clad paying clients says, and Bravo expects us to laugh, because everything in “Zola” is played for outrageous comedic effect. Perhaps that tone is where my misgivings with the movie begin. Sure, it’s fun to see a movie skewer the vapid soullessness of social media and the unregulated economy of male desire, but “Zola” ultimately rings hollow. The actors are fearless, and yet, how much do we know about these characters in the end? The answer: something of their values, but almost nothing of their lives. Despite everything we endure together, this acquaintance extends no deeper than the glitter on their faces.

At the outset, Zola describes her story as “kind of long but full of suspense,” but it’s neither. The film runs barely 82 minutes before credits, and much of the really dramatic stuff has been invented to make the adventure seem more interesting. Yes, there are moments when we genuinely fear whether the characters will make it out alive, but the movie doesn’t seem to value their safety as much as we do. What happens to their injuries? Do they ever get home? Sure, what went down was crazy, but even with all of the dramatic license (read “embellishment and exaggeration”), one doubts this was even the 10th-most-insane thing that happened in Tampa over the weekend of March 27, 2015. It’s just the one that Zola happened to tweet about, and now we all know her story.

Reviewed at Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 24, 2019. Running time: 87 MIN.

Production: An A24 release and production. Producers: Christine Vachon, David Hinojosa, Gia Walsh, Kara Baker, Vince Jolivette, Elizabeth Haggard, Dave Franco. Executive producers: A'Ziah-Monae “Zola” King, Jennifer Konawal, David Kushner. Co-producer: Allison Rose Carter.
Crew: Director: Janicza Bravo. Screenplay: Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris, based on the tweets by A'Ziah-Monae “Zola” King and the article “Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted” by David Kushner. Camera: Ari Wegner. Editor: Joi McMillon. Music: Mica Levi.
With: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nelcie Souffrant, Nasir Rahim , Amelia Rose Monteagudo, Ari’el Stachel, Colman Domingo, Nick Braun, Jason Mitchell, TS Madison, Tommy Foxhill.

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Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in Zola (2020)

A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild road trip to Florida. A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild road trip to Florida. A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild road trip to Florida.

Janicza Bravo
Jeremy O. Harris
A'Ziah King
Taylour Paige
Riley Keough
Nicholas Braun
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(as Nick Braun)

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(as Tony Demil)
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Trivia Based on a true story told in a popular twitter thread containing 148 tweets written by Detroit waitress A'Ziah "Zola" King in October 2015. The story quickly went viral, garnering the recognition of people such as Missy Elliott , Solange and Ava DuVernay . About a month later, Rolling Stone magazine published an article interviewing people involved in the story.
Goofs Zola has said that the scene with the rival pimp being shot never happened. She made it up to embellish her story and make it seem more interesting.

[first lines]

Zola : You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out? It's kinda long, but it's full of suspense.

Connections Referenced in WatchMojo: Top 10 Movies That Will Blow Your Mind in 2020 (2020)
Soundtracks But Not For Me Written by Johnnie Louise Richardson Performed by The Clickettes Published by Idea Music Courtesy of Resnik Group By arrangement with Gravelpit Music on behalf of Capp Records, Inc. and Music Supervisor, Inc.

User reviews 156

Jul 21, 2021
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June 30, 2021 (United States)
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Ranch House Grill - South Tampa, Florida, USA (Restaurant)
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Jul 4, 2021

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Runtime 1 hour 26 minutes
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The Movie Zola Is About More Than Just a Wild Weekend Gone Wrong

ZOLA movie from left Riley Keough Taylour Paige 2020. © A24 courtesy Everett Collection

As the relatively new digital proverb goes, “Every day Twitter has one main character. Aspire not to be them.” And while that’s solid advice for a platform where an unmindful tweet can cause strangers to angrily appear in your mentions, sometimes being the main character has its perks. At least this is true for Aziah “Zola” Wells, whose viral 2015 Twitter thread became the greatest stripper saga of the last decade—so great that it’s now a movie: Zola , in theaters now.

When Wells wrote that famous 148-tweet thread in October 2015—well before we could create threads seamlessly on the platform—she was mainly trying to chronicle an amusing, if dangerous and almost unbelievable, weekend. The resulting movie tells the autobiographical story of Zola (played by Taylour Paige), a waitress and exotic dancer who embarks on a road trip to Tampa with a new friend, Stefani (Riley Keough), also a stripper, one day after meeting her. During the weekend, Stefani and Zola face wild challenges, many caused by the former’s violent pimp, X (Colman Domingo). It becomes very clear, very quickly: This is not the trip Zola signed up for.

As in the original thread, Zola the movie depicts the freedom, intricacies, and limitations of the sex work industry, the relevancy of social media, and the fragility that can accompany fast-made friends. Opening with an iconic line from her original Twitter thread—“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out?”—Wells found the film’s portrayal of her experience uncanny.

Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in the Zola movie.

“I was a little taken aback with the accuracy. It kind of felt like I was back there again,” Wells tells Glamour . “And there was a lot of emotion from me because, you know, this was something that really happened.”

But she also thinks the film is an independent entity unto itself. She says watching it has helped her come to terms with the emotions she has about the experience.

“Yes, this happened to me. But now it’s, like, a separate piece of art, right?” Wells says. “It’s, like, its own thing now. And now I can watch it and be thoroughly entertained. That’s not me. That’s Taylour. I think it helps me completely process and heal too.”

Director Janicza Bravo came onto the project in 2017 and enlisted playwright Jeremy O. Harris to complete the screenplay with her. She says when she read the thread in 2015, she knew it was a story she wanted to tell. The mood, tone, and aesthetic of the film are grandiose, and the characters are intentional caricatures: Zola, an unserious, street-smart but overconfident protagonist; Stefani, untrustworthy and unabashed in her appropriation; and X, unscrupulous in deed and desire. They are simultaneously what you imagined and what you couldn’t possibly have imagined.

Contrasted against this is Bravo's use (or lack of use) of sound—a Twitter “ding,” the exaggerated inflection of Paige’s voiceover, and silence that forces you to reckon with the actions depicted. Bravo masterfully rearranges your expectations of Zola ; what you might think will be merely goofy, bright, and funny is actually far more potent.

“It’s a little bit of candy, and it’s a little bit of a ride,” Bravo says. “But it’s also, like, super stressful and really traumatizing. There’s a message here, and there’s politics, and you’re laughing. And you’re asking yourself, ‘Am I okay? And do I treat people well?’ And you probably don’t, and that’s fine. But walk away from this knowing that about yourself and try to do better.”

With so much packed into this film , Zola will probably leave you a bit confused, if not unfulfilled, wondering if you missed something. And that’s the brilliance of it: Now you’ll have to watch it over and over to ensure you have the full story of how, exactly, Zola and that bitch fell out.

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Kovie Biakolo is a writer and journalist. Follow her on Twitter @koviebiakolo .

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Zola is a slick, seedy Florida odyssey

The new movie brings a viral tweetstorm to life with absurdist, madcap glee.

by Constance Grady

Early on in Zola , the stylish and glitzy new movie adapted from a viral 2015 tweetstorm by A’Ziah “Zola” King, our heroine falls in love.

Zola (Taylour Paige) is a waitress at the kind of chain restaurant that makes all its waitresses wear miniskirts; she also moonlights as a stripper. She marches through the world with steely self-possession, and the first time she sees Stefani (Riley Keough) sidle into her restaurant, Zola is not impressed. Stefani is a white girl decked out in an aesthetic borrowed from Black women: long fake nails, long weave, baby hairs arranged in immaculate swirls, blaccent to the fore. Zola, who is actually Black, looks Stefani up and down with polite disdain and mentally discards her.

But then Stefani corners Zola on her own. She’s sure she recognizes Zola from somewhere, Stefani says. Is Zola maybe a stripper?

“I dance,” Stefani explains, with just a little edge of defensiveness in her voice.

“Okay, bitch,” says Zola, with newfound respect, “me too.”

The two women reconsider each other. They are, as King wrote in her original tweetstorm, “vibing over [their] hoeism.” As they gaze into each other’s eyes, a little red heart pings onto the screen into the space between them. Love, social media style.

It’s a witty moment, the kind of touch at which Zola writer-director Janicza Bravo and co-screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris excel: This story, it’s clear, is a digital native through and through, in ways that inflect the way it understands and depicts love. But the little red heart also sets up the emotional underpinning of everything that’s to come. Because Zola is, fundamentally, the story of a friendship betrayed. It’s the story of realizing that someone you thought was not just an ally but a soul mate is actually ready and willing to exploit you.

Or as King put it in her iconic tweet, and Paige recites with deadpan solemnity in the film’s first line: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out??????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”

Here’s the short version.

Stefani invites Zola to come stripping with her for the weekend at a club in Florida, where easy money is guaranteed. Her roommate and her boyfriend will come along for the drive and set them up with a place to stay, she promises.

As the weekend goes on, however, it becomes clear to Zola that Stefani’s roommate, X, is actually her pimp. Stefani didn’t bring Zola down to Florida just to strip; X wants the two girls to spend the weekend working as escorts, and Stefani appears more than willing to play along. Stefani, in fact, seems to have served Zola to X on a silver platter.

Zola has a tricky tonal line to walk here. This movie wants to be a sleazy-fun joyride, to capture the madcap “what the fuck did I just read” energy that made King’s original tweetstorm a sensation. King wrote her story in 148 tweets before Twitter even had threads, so people passed around the tweets in screencaps to make them readable, and it still trended under multiple hashtags: That’s the kind of unstoppable force of nature the film is dealing with.

But Zola is also a story about sex trafficking, which makes it difficult to delve into juicy drama without also feeling gross and exploitative. Some of the victims of X and Stefani’s real-life equivalents have already made their displeasure with this movie known .

Bravo’s solution to this tonal problem is to keep her focus firmly on Paige as Zola. Zola’s dubiously arched eyebrows as she watches Stefani trash-talk another girl’s “nappy-ass weave” speak volumes, and she maintains her own boundaries throughout the film with an iron will that comes to seem heroic.

Zola has decided what she is and is not willing to do for money, and what she is and is not willing to do with her body, and despite the increasing pressures Stefani and X apply to her, she never wavers. Paige’s steeliness gives this movie its heart, and the deadpan terseness of her narration (“they started fucking, it was gross”) gives it its loopy verve.

The supporting cast around Paige is just as solid. As X, Colman Domingo veers ably back and forth between affable charm and unhinged violent threat. As Stefani’s hapless and cuckolded boyfriend Derrek, Nicholas Braun rolls out another version of his breakout performance as Succession ’s Cousin Greg: so tall, so sweetly unable to do anything quite right.

Keough, meanwhile, makes Stefani into a slippery force of nature. Like Zola, you can never quite get a handle on her. At times she seems to cower before X in terror, a victim just like Zola, and at other times she seems as callous and manipulative as X himself is. Her eyes, squinting out from behind her Lolita sunglasses and piles of pink eyeshadow, seem too empty and glazed to read anything into.

That’s part of the point. Bravo likes to frame Stefani and Zola standing in front of mirrors together, gazing at each other’s reflections. They mirror each other, too: They reflect each other’s deepest fears and most hidden desires. It’s hard to read Stefani, in part, because our narrator Zola wants it to be.

As slick and stylish as Zola is, not all of its many flourishes land. The repeated conceit of having the “new tweet” sound go off in the background every time someone says a line from King’s original tweetstorm is at first funny, then distracting, and then finally lost in the background. The underwritten ending arrives so abruptly that it could give you whiplash.

It’s a case where Bravo and Harris might have done better to lean on King, who included a “here’s where they all ended up” epilogue in her tweetstorm. She knew her readers would need some kind of closure after the ride she had just taken them on, and she was ready to provide it.

“And that’s the end of that,” King concluded, back in 2015. “If u stuck wit that whole story you are hilarious lol.” If you stick with Zola to the end, you’ll feel marvelously unsettled.

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Zola Is a Magnetizing Stripper Road Trip Movie Ripped From a Real Life Viral Tweet Thread

One of the most talked about films at Sundance takes on a bizarre mostly-true story that began as a 2015 Tweetstorm.

“You wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”

That quote opens director Janicza Bravo’s magnetizing, rollercoaster second feature film, Zola , which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. It’s also how the viral 148-tweet thread that inspired the movie begins—with a question that beckons you to unravel a stranger than fiction tale about a South Floridian weekend gone wrong, using a particularly niche internet vocabulary to do so.

As detailed on Twitter in October of 2015 , Aziah “Zola” Wells recounts a 48-hour cross-country road trip from Detroit to Tampa with a newly-befriended exotic dancer named Jess, who brings along her boyfriend and a man eventually revealed to be her pimp. What was initially promised to be a couple nights of easy cash by dancing at strip clubs quickly spiraled into a chaotic prostitution nightmare. In other words, it’s a story tailor-made for social media—prone to exaggeration, bursting with humor, suspense and deftly deployed turns of phrase.

From the moment Zola tweeted her story, the response was overwhelming, garnering thousands of retweets and shares. Culture websites discovered the thread and began suggesting its movie plot potential. It wasn’t long before studios got interested, and in 2016, Killer Films acquired the rights and tapped James Franco to direct a script from Andrew Neel and Mike Roberts. (Franco merged into a producing role before eventually dropping off the project). In 2017, Bravo began talks to direct, bringing A24 officially onboard, and she tapped co-writer Jeremy O. Harris for a script rewrite.

Using Zola’s tweets, along with a 2015 Rolling Stone feature that dove deeper into the abbreviated journey , Bravo and co-writer O. Harris bring Zola’s colorful and eccentric memories to authentic life. When the ragtag group arrives in Florida, Zola (Taylour Paige) and Stefani (Riley Keough), renamed for the movie, begin dancing at a podunk strip-bar, but their small paydays prompt Stefani’s pimp, X (Colman Domingo), to change course. He posts a photo of the pair on a backpage ad, forces them into a hotel room and brings in rough-looking male clients. This mostly becomes Stefani’s burden over the remainder of the weekend, as Zola tries to find them a way out of X’s clutches.

This could have been a movie that attempted to pace itself in Zola’s threaded mold, but Bravo wisely slows down and pays attention to the monotonous routines of driving, dancing and changing outfits, details that humanize and quiet what can often be a broad and loud movie. In this way, Zola offers some of the intimate, backstage stripper-family comedy in last year’s Hustlers without ever shying away from darker themes.

To keep things light, and inflect the right amount of quick-hit comedy that Zola’s Twitter feed produced, Bravo and Harris add sporadic narration, sometimes stealing Zola’s own tweets to relay her inner feelings during tenuous and confusing moments. When Zola and Jess Stefani text back and forth, Bravo has them talk to each other, as though they’re having face-to-face dialogue, which crackles once Stefani begins deceiving Zola and leading her further astray. It all adds to a spellbinding, harp-heavy soundtrack, often infiltrated by Twitter chirp sound effects and other cell phone pings. Those noises add another layer of humor but remain reminders that this story was strategically posted in bite-size pieces, then shared, retweeted and deciphered by thousands online.

These aural flourishes grasp at the universally tempting desire to narrativize our own experiences in real time, to consciously structure and highlight the more mundane parts of our life. Maybe not all of Zola’s story is accurate—in the Rolling Stone article, she admits to embellishing a suicide attempt and a gun battle, which the movie chooses to portray anyways in humorous and bloody form—but her inclination to punch up her story, accented by those repeating chirp sounds, feels particularly insightful. When using social media as a primary storytelling platform, it’s easier to focus on the peaks, to anticipate the potential dopamine rush after hitting “post,” even if that means, in this case, being surrounded by the threat of violence. A cocked shotgun inside a motel room portends a fatal ending—and at the same time it becomes a crucial, exciting plot development.

During a Q&A following the premiere, Bravo reminded the audience that the majority of stories written about Zola’s testimony initially questioned her portrayal of events, a persistent consequence of being a woman of color, she said. “When you submit your truth, the validity of the thing you’re talking about comes into question.” In her research, Bravo found that Stefani had actually submitted her own contradictory account of those two days (perhaps attempting to rehabilitate the damage to her image) in a Reddit post. As a way to acknowledge that rebuttal of facts, and highlight the message board medium where it was posted, Bravo inserts a brief perspective change more than halfway through the movie, abbreviating all the prior events from Stefani’s point of view.

Keough portrays this character with a trashy, appropriating accent, naive to the way Zola might interpret her vocabulary and affectation. Her boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun, most popularly known for playing Cousin Greg on Succession ), is a similarly negligent, but pure-hearted goof, who steals parts of the movie with his line readings (“Makin that shmoney,” he tells someone when asked why he’s in Florida). When the pair begins rapping to the radio or complaining about colleagues in the car, Zola can only offer looks of “WTF” befuddlement. The couple is immune to the kinds of deep-seeded racism that surrounds their southern trip, something Bravo suggests when the group’s Jeep zooms by a confederate flag on the highway, or by two police officers beating a black man in a driveway; the camera looks back while Stefani and Derrek hardly notice. This is not a place, an environment, that wants Zola to believe she’s a full human being, and Paige (incredibly skilled as a pole dancer), powerfully lends austere and knowing glances as though she is merely a spectator hoping to elude trouble.

That’s the extent to which Zola decides to be a deeper, more comprehensive story. The movie opts not to expand on the real-life fallout of Stefani’s pimp—given ferocity and an occasional Nigerian-accented bark by Colman Domingo—and the sex work he trafficked for years. Nor does it have much of an ending. Despite the cinematography and sharp attention to detail resembling Sean Baker’s Tangerine and The Florida Project , Bravo is instead keen on channeling the verve and thrills that a movie such as Spring Breakers provides. Like a tweetstorm, the pleasures of Zola are simpler, dramatically sketched and ephemeral—likely one of thousands of similar stories across the country just sitting in the drafts folder waiting for the right time to be shared.

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‘Zola’ Ends up Exploiting Women Anyway

Sex work Twitter-thread film adaptation isn’t as entertaining or wild as it thinks

“Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” So reads the first volley in a 148-tweet thread that spawned Janicza Bravo’s Zola , a messy and maddening black comedy about two strippers on a work trip gone wrong.

Zola may be the first twitter thread-to-movie adaptation, or at least the first that’s made a splash. Director Bravo, with co-screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), has translated it into a semi-coherent, good-looking movie. Shot in the same pastel, trash-glam palette as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, it’s another entry in the Floridasploitation genre. If only its subject matter was as daffy as it thinks it is.

ZOLA ★★ (2/5 stars) Directed by: Janicza Bravo Written by: Janicza Bravo, Jeremy O. Harris Starring: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun Running time: 86 min

In case you aren’t familiar: in 2015, a woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King unleashed this thread about a jaw-dropping jaunt from hell. She thought her new friend, Jessica, had invited her to dance at a club, but ended up in a hotel room turning tricks along with the other woman, who’d lured her there knowingly. Their driver turned out to be Jessica’s pimp, and the woman’s boyfriend, also along for the ride, was an emotional mess. Guns eventually entered the mix. It was a bad scene.

It was also compulsively readable, if not entirely plausible, and it made Zola a viral star. At some point, Hollywood slated James Franco to direct a film version of what’s now known as #TheStory, and I think we can all feel some relief that didn’t happen. Instead, they attached Bravo to direct, stars Taylour Paige and Riley Keough signed on, and the movie took on the promise of being a righteous, feminist big-screen version of Zola’s story.

Paige ( Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ) does bemused quite effectively as Zola, a diner waitress chatted up by a customer named Stefani ( Riley Keough , whose character had a different name in the Twitter thread). Stefani opens classily with a compliment about Zola’s apple-like titties. They bond over being exotic dancers, with Bravo subtitling their salty banter, cutely, along the lines of “I see you”/”I feel seen.” The director throws in freeze frames, split screens, and tweet sound effects throughout to underline the source material. This makes sense, I guess, but it also feels like a choice that will almost instantly calcify this in amber as a period piece, something for the olds and their retro social media platforms.

Soon, Stefani’s texting Zola an invite to come down to Florida to perform at a club. It seems a little early in the friendship, but what the hell: Zola is up for making some money. She doesn’t think her boyfriend will go for it, though, so she has to “fuck [him] calm,” the first of the film’s many depictions of transactional sex. It was also the first time I began to lose my faith in Zola (the movie, that is) being the good time that was hyped.

It becomes quickly apparent that Stefani’s “roommate” (Colman Domingo), here called X, is bad news, and that her boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun, Cousin Greg of Succession) is the group’s oblivious weak link. While Stefani and Zola are out dancing, he’s way too friendly to a sketchy motel denizen named Dion (Jason Mitchell) who will later show up to take Stefani hostage for a badly thought-out ransom ploy. In the intervening hours, Zola will staunchly refuse to take part in prostitution, but she will help Stefani make more money doing it, despite being understandably pissed at being roped in, because X is only charging $150 and “pussy is worth thousands.” True!

There’s also a very graphic and slightly gnarly montage of clients’ dicks, which feels like one of the most honest things about this movie. It’s also refreshing in its total lack of debauchery: There are no drugs or alcohol fueling this story, and the sex, as before, is eye-openingly joyless. Keough does an excellent job of maintaining Stefani’s game face, during an epic parade of brief and depressing paid trysts, while clearly telegraphing that she’s somewhere else. Somewhere nicer, hopefully.

At one point, Bravo turns the narrative over to Stefani, who protests that we have it all backwards and Zola is the one who’s the hot mess who got them into tricking. (This is apparently based on a Reddit post authored by Jessica.) But mostly we stick with Zola, who rides out this horror show with as little involvement as possible while trying to keep her disaster of a friend from getting ripped off or killed. It’s a testament to the wherewithal of the real Zola, who turned a harrowing situation into a good yarn. Yay for keeping your head on straight and not taking any shit, but I just couldn’t muster up a lot of enjoyment for any of this.

I hate feminist purity tests. I was sad when Promising Young Woman stirred up a backlash so quickly after it came out, for not being the right kind of rape revenge movie. There are a million different ways to make films about women having agency, and it’s OK for some of those plots to be morally flawed. They can still be entertaining! And well made! And have characters we can root for even as they’re doing dubious things!

But Zola still bummed me out. I just couldn’t get on board with the wacky, how-wild-is-this vibe. At its core, it’s about a lot of really shitty things happening to two young women, mostly thanks to some shitty men, and even if one of the women is ultimately victorious in claiming the narrative, and apparently making a fair amount of money off it, sex trafficking still isn’t funny. X slapping Stefani around and telling her her tits belong to him isn’t funny. Neither is making sex workers a punchline, which is about as retro as it gets.

Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart is a film critic and a culture and entertainment writer whose work is featured in the New York Post, CNN.com, and more. A Rotten Tomatoes certified reviewer for both film and television, Sara's work can be fully appreciated at sarastewart.org. But not on Twitter, because she’s been troll-free since 2018.

‘Reagan’ Review: The Gipper Takes on Moscow

In this unabashed love letter to former president Ronald Reagan, Dennis Quaid fights the Cold War with conviction.

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On a private jet, a woman in an orange blouse is hugged by a man in a white dress shirt and a gray striped tie.

By Glenn Kenny

In his long career, Dennis Quaid has sometimes played politicians. He’s been former President Bill Clinton (“The Special Relationship”) and was the president in the musical comedy “American Dreamz” with Hugh Grant and Willem Dafoe. Now, in “Reagan,” Quaid portrays former President Ronald Reagan with, if not brilliance, at least evident conviction. Time truly holds surprises for all of us.

The movie, directed by Sean McNamara from a screenplay by Howard Klausner, opens with Quaid as the 40th president leaving a speech site and walking right into an assassination attempt. The picture then moves to present-day Moscow. Jon Voight plays Viktor Petrovich, a retired K.G.B. agent with an accent straight out of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” who narrates the story of Reagan to a younger functionary. And so we shift back to the 1980s, and then back to Reagan’s early years in radio and Hollywood. (Mena Suvari plays Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, and Penelope Ann Miller is Nancy.)

In the first eight minutes, the movie makes as many temporal shifts as a 1960s Alain Resnais work, albeit quite less gracefully.

Why is Reagan’s story relayed by a K.G.B. guy? Because in this unabashed love letter to the former president, Reagan was the force behind the fall of the Soviet Union. The movie implies that this “evil empire” collapsed as a result not just of his presidency, but of his anti-Communist activism during his entertainment career in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. These eras are depicted in scenes strongly suggesting that before shooting, the cinematographer, Christian Sebaldt, happened upon a fire sale on diffusion filters at the camera store.

The cast is dotted with cameos from the actors Lesley-Anne Down and Kevin Dillon; the prominent Hollywood conservatives Kevin Sorbo and Robert Davi also appear as seals of approval, one infers. It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

Reagan Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.

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New movie 'City of Dreams' explores harrowing, harsh, heartbreaking issue of child human trafficking

HOLLYWOOD -- Dreams" follows a young boy from Mexico whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are shattered when he's trafficked across the border and sold to a sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles.

Director Mo Ramchandani has been working on this story for years and is passionate about its message. "I think this movie is very intense and real and I designed it in a way to really punch people in the gut and wake them up to this. It talks about labor trafficking here in America. it brings us back home and shows us what's happening in our back yard."

The film focuses on Jesus... a young man whose journey is even more harrowing because he is unable to speak.

"I said I don't want this movie to be preachy, I don't want it to be political," said Ramchandani. "I just wanted to get into this character, into his head, and show you from his point of view what happened and the emotional toll it takes on him."

The director saw hundreds of actors for his lead role before discovering young actor Ari Lopez in Mexico.

"I said from the beginning the two most important components are the camera and the kid," said Ramchandani. "I looked at him and it was like that's it! He is such a vulnerable emotional open human being, I feel like the universe blessed me, I got really lucky."

On screen, Mo doesn't sugar coat what Jesus must go through. He hopes movie-goers will be motivated to find out more about the human trafficking issue.

"In the end, if people are affected emotionally that's when they take action," said Ramchandani. "My intention was to get people angry to say enough is enough."

One of the executive producers of the film is singer Luis Fonsi, who also contributes a song to the film 's soundtrack.

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The karate kid review: the iconic underdog sports film ages surprisingly well after 40 years.

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I Know Which Classic Legends Villain I Want Sigourney Weaver To Play In Star Wars' Next Movie

Harry potter star admits she briefly forgot she was in the magical franchise, “no other gangster film ever did”: the godfather has 1 surprising secret to success, coppola says.

Following the success of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky , one of the biggest trends of the 1980s became underdog sports stories, with one of the more iconic being The Karate Kid . Helmed by original Rocky director John G. Avildsen, the 1984 teen drama not only became one of the biggest hits of its year, but also spawned a franchise that is still going to this day, including two direct sequels and the Netflix TV show Cobra Kai , which has served as a legacy sequel to the original movies.

The Karate Kid

The Karate Kid starred Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso , a 17-year-old who moves from New Jersey to California with his mother and struggles to adjust to his new life and high school. He becomes the target for a group of teenagers that study at the Cobra Kai dojo under the ruthless John Kreese. Daniel ultimately finds both comfort and a friend in the form of his apartment complex's eccentric handyman, Mr. Miyagi, who agrees to train him in karate, though with a unique set of chores and only as long as he maintains the mentality of using it for defense.

The Karate Kid's Underdog Story Remains A Crowdpleaser

Staying true to the rocky formula makes the plot largely predictable, but still enjoyable.

The concept of an unexpected star rising through the ranks of a sport with the help of a devoted trainer was not a new concept, even by the time Rocky came along, though it had often been used for more comedic effect, such as with Slap Shot, The Longest Yard and The Bad News Bears . Regardless of their varying tones, the subgenre did largely stick to the same formula, bringing their respective protagonists victory in some form or other.

Despite the familiarity, though, it's hard to deny the crowdpleasing nature of The Karate Kid 's story.

With The Karate Kid , writer Robert Mark Kamen does stick a little too closely to the formula for the movie to be completely original. Daniel's improvement of his karate skills is appropriately gradual, but isn't without the expected montages to make progress a little quicker. Even his rise through the tournament itself stays true to the underdog format. Daniel easily beats his first few opponents, then has a few hits land on him before ultimately winning the fights.

Despite the familiarity, though, it's hard to deny the crowdpleasing nature of The Karate Kid 's story . Macchio's performance as Daniel is full of life and emotion, which makes it easy for us to want to see him succeed in the tournament. The dedicated support from Daniel's mom, his love interest Ali and Mr. Miyagi also gives Macchio's protagonist all the more reason to want to win and prove himself.

Some Of The Karate Kid's Characters Are Underdeveloped

The focus on daniel leaves us wanting more from those around him.

While his connections to these characters may be part of why we want to root for him, The Karate Kid 's supporting characters struggle to be fully realized people. Elisabeth Shue's Ali largely exists to support Daniel, even as the movie makes the occasional attempt to highlight her desire to break free from her upper-class family and friends' judgment to love him. One of the more notable instances of this underwhelming character work is how quickly she forgives Daniel after he gets cocky about his new car from Mr. Miyagi.

it would have been nice to see Morita be given a more in-depth role from the get-go.

William Zabka's Johnny Lawrence is another notable Karate Kid character who is woefully underdeveloped as the movie progresses. Even without the knowledge of Cobra Kai putting Johnny on a path of redemption , the movie offers a few hints at him being more than just the atypical bully, clearly hurt by being spurned by Ali and lacking the right behavior to get a second chance with her. Even after all the animosity between them, Johnny congratulating Daniel at the end and telling him he's alright proves there was far more of his character to explore.

One of the biggest characters who needed more focus was Pat Morita's Mr. Miyagi. Between Daniel being the protagonist and playing up the mystic POC mentor trope that has been featured in countless movies, Miyagi is largely an enigma, with only a handful of mentions of his father teaching him some of the things he teaches Daniel, and a heartbreaking scene in which he relives the death of his wife and son. While later franchise installments would start to reveal more about him, it would have been nice to see Morita be given a more in-depth role from the get-go.

The Karate Kid's Humor Ages Surprisingly Well

Avoiding any outright dated jokes helps the karate kid mostly hold up.

After 40 years, The Karate Kid 's script and humor ages very well. Despite the era being rife with movies targeting everything from race to sexuality for low-brow jokes, Kamen largely treats the central Asian character with respect by avoiding too many major stereotypes and racist characters. Even Johnny and Kreese's various threats against Johnny and Miyagi aren't offensive, just appropriately sinister.

Overall, The Karate Kid certainly has some flaws that become easier to recognize with time and when viewing the movie from a macro perspective, but it still largely overcomes them to remain an underdog sports classic. Macchio and Morita not only deliver outstanding individual performances, but also show a remarkable chemistry with one another, and Martin Kove's performance as Kreese remains an effectively chilling foil to the film's leads. With a new Karate Kid movie releasing in May 2025 and Cobra Kai restoring the franchise's win streak, one can hope the former continues to pull the right lessons.

Released in 1984, The Karate Kid follows the story of Daniel LaRusso on his unexpected journey to becoming a Karate expert under the tutelage of a martial arts master. Recently relocated from New Jersey to Los Angeles, Daniel and his mother are trying to adapt to their new home. Unfortunately, Daniel becomes the target of a gang of Cobra Kai dojo students. When his handyman, Mr. Miyagi, saves him with expert Karate skills, Daniel convinces him to teach him his Karate to defend himself, and put his bullies in their place.

The story is an appropriately crowdpleasing underdog journey.
Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita are stellar in their individual performances, and their chemistry.
The fight sequences are effectively shot to showcase proper choreography.
It follows the underdog formula too closely, making it predictable.
Some characters feel underdeveloped in favor of keeping the focus on Daniel.

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‘don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight’ review: an extraordinary adaptation takes a child’s-eye view of an african civil war.

Actress Embeth Davidtz makes her directorial debut with a drama based on Alexandra Fuller's 2001 memoir, and anchored by a remarkable star turn from a 7-year-old.

By Caryn James

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Alexandra Fuller ‘s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz ’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia — a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted.

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10 Gothic Romance Movies Better Than 'The Crow'

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Adapted from James O'Barr 's 1989 superhero comic book series, The Crow is a 2024 gothic romantic superhero film. Starring Bill Skarsgård as the titular character and FKA Twigs as his girlfriend Shelly, the film follows Eric Draven, a young man who returns from death to avenge his murder and that of his girlfriend's at the hands of an evil man with demonic ties.

The Crow has received negative critical reviews while still attracting fans due to its popular source material, charismatic lead actors, and strong visual aesthetic. However, those looking for better choices to explore the intriguing blend of gothic aesthetics and romantic themes should turn their attention elsewhere. These are some of the best gothic romance movies that fans will surely enjoy. After all, The Crow did its best to portray its tragic love story, but these movies did it better.

The Crow (2024)

11 'the hunger' (1983), directed by tony scott.

Miriam Blaylock standing still with a young man behind her in the Hunger

The directorial debut of Tony Scott , The Hunger is a 1983 romantic vampire horror film. It follows Miriam ( Catherine Deneuve ), an ancient vampire who promises eternal life to her lovers while hiding the fact that their bodies will eventually decay. When Miriam's current partner, John ( David Bowie ), begins rapidly aging, it is up to Sarah ( Susan Sarandon ), a researcher, to stop Miriam.

Although it received mixed reviews at the time, The Hunger has gained a reputation as a queer horror classic and has become very popular among members of the goth subculture. Featuring one of horror's best female vampires in Miriam, The Hunger has a twisted and compelling love triangle at its core and an existentially horrifying threat. Stylish and sinister, the film is a must-watch for fans of dark romance .

The Hunger (1983)

Not available

9 'Underworld' (2003)

Directed by len wiseman.

A close-up of Kate Beckinsale as Selene in Underworld

Underworld is a 2003 action horror film directed by Len Wiseman . The film is set in a world with an ongoing feud between vampires and werewolves and follows Selene ( Kate Beckinsale ), a vampire who assassinates werewolves. Her life is complicated, however, when Selene develops feelings for Michael ( Scott Speedman ), a man bitten by a werewolf, and must choose between him and her life's work.

The film is incredibly stylish, featuring a striking color grade and incredibly cool goth-inspired clothing . Underworld 's action sequences are exciting and tie well into its universe's wider lore, and its werewolf transformation sequences are extremely detailed and well done. The first film in a wider series beloved by its fans, Underworld is one of the most notable supernatural action films in cinema.

Rent on Amazon

8 'Byzantium' (2013)

Directed by neil jordan.

Saoirse Ronan covered in blood and sitting in an elevator in Byzantium

Adapted by Moira Buffini from her stage play "A Vampire Story," Byzantium is a 2012 vampire film directed by Neil Jordan . The film centers on a vampire mother and daughter duo, Clara ( Gemma Arterton ) and Eleanor ( Saoirse Ronan ), as they deal with their traumatic pasts and growing tensions between them. When Eleanor begins a relationship with a local boy, and a powerful vampire organization hunts Clara down for major infractions against their code of conduct, their familial bond is put to the test.

Tackling difficult themes of trauma and misogyny as well as universal existential questions, Byzantium is a thought-provoking film about motherhood, aging and death. Featuring captivating performances from both women, the film provides a compelling look at the extent to which people can go for their loved ones , as well as the limitations of such a feeling. Dark and stylish, Byzantium is a dramatic and gothic story about love of all kinds.

A poster of Byzantium featuring a woman leaning against a wall with a giant neon sign with the movie title in front of her

Watch on AMC+

7 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999)

Directed by tim burton.

A pale blonde woman in Victorian era clothing stands in a dark forest

Based on the popular 1820 short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , Tim Burton 's Sleepy Hollow is a supernatural horror film. The film follows Ichabod Crane ( Johnny Depp ), a police officer tasked with investigating a murder case allegedly committed by an undead assailant known as the Headless Horseman. Alongside a local young woman, Katrina ( Christina Ricci ), Ichabod begins to uncover a dark conspiracy behind the Horseman’s arrival.

The film is very effectively creepy, making great use of its historical setting and its classic gothic source material. Like Tim Burton’s best work, Sleepy Hollow is visually striking with a highly unique atmosphere and beautiful use of color. Featuring strong performances and a spooky supernatural element, Sleepy Hollow is a gothic modern classic and one of the best R-rated horror films of the 1990s .

Sleepy Hollow

6 'crimson peak' (2015), directed by guillermo del toro.

Edith looks worried while holding onto Thomas in Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak is a 2015 supernatural gothic romance directed by Guillermo del Toro and co-written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins . Set at the turn of the 20th century, it follows a young woman named Edith ( Mia Wasikowska ) as she marries the charming and wealthy Thomas ( Tom Hiddleston ) and becomes entangled in the lives of him and his cruel sister, Lucille ( Jessica Chastain ). Encountering both supernatural entities and very human threats at his estate, Edith has to fight for her life.

In line with del Toro's other work, Crimson Peak is a feast for the eyes , featuring gorgeous settings and stunning costumes and visual effects. The film takes a somewhat optimistic approach to its romance for a horror film about marriage , portraying its central relationship as a positive and healing experience for Thomas despite his dark past. One of prolific fantasy horror maestro del Toro's most underrated films, Crimson Peak is fantastic.

Crimson Peak

5 'only lovers left alive' (2013), directed by jim jarmusch.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston hugging in Only Lovers Left Alive.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a 2013 gothic romance written and directed by Jim Jarmusch . The film follows a suicidal vampire, Adam ( Tom Hiddleston ), as he grapples with a disillusionment with humanity and with the implications of his immortality. Noticing his suffering, Adam's optimistic and estranged partner, Eve ( Tilda Swinton ), returns to their apartment to help him gain a sense of joy and fulfillment.

The film is a subtle and beautiful vampire romance , focusing on the wondrous potential and inevitable melancholy that would truly come from immortality. Swinton and Hiddleston have excellent chemistry, with their characters perfectly complementing each other as opposites. Thoughtful, life-affirming, and deliciously atmospheric , Only Lovers Left Alive is a highly underrated vampire film and possibly the best gothic romance movie of the new millennium.

Only Lovers Left Alive

4 'spring' (2014), directed by justin benson and aaron moorhead.

Written and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead , Spring is a 2014 romantic supernatural body horror movie. It follows Evan ( Lou Taylor Pucci ), a man grieving the death of his mother, who travels to Italy and meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Louise ( Nadia Hilker ). The two begin a relationship, but things are greatly complicated by the revelation that she is a 2000-year-old shape-shifting monster.

Spring 's greatest strength is its love story, brought to life by the leads' excellent chemistry. Despite Louise's monstrous nature, the audience has no choice but to root for her and Evan due to their genuine love and the positive impact they have on one another. One of the most beautiful monster romances in horror cinema, Spring is a sweet and gruesome story about love conquering all.

3 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night' (2014)

Directed by ana lily amirpour.

The Girl, a young woman with fangs wearing a chador in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a 2014 Iranian romantic vampire Western written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour . The film follows Arash ( Arash Marandi ), a young man forced into petty crime to ease the struggle of his father's heroin addiction and debt to a drug dealer. When he meets a mysterious young woman ( Sheila Vand ) who is secretly a vampire, Arash's life begins to gain new meaning.

Set in Iran but filmed in California, the film is visually stunning, making use of striking black-and-white cinematography and clever camera movements. The central love story is strange and tender , representing the one shining light in both characters' lives despite their difficult circumstances. Subversive, beautiful and dark, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a wonderful gothic romance with one of the genre's most original premises.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

2 'thirst' (2009), directed by park chan-wook.

Kim Ok-bin and Song Kang-ho in Thirst. He is kissing her neck.

Thirst is a 2009 romantic vampire film written and directed by Park Chan-wook . The film follows Sang-hyun ( Song Kang-ho ), a good-hearted priest who signs up for a medical experiment that leaves him with an unquenchable thirst for blood. Now a vampire, Sang-hyun begins a relationship with Tae-ju ( Kim Ok-bin ), a married woman with a secret dark side that causes chaos in both their lives.

The film features stellar performances and a highly compelling and twisted relationship at its center , striking a perfect balance between the romantic and the grotesque. Park Chan-wook is an acclaimed filmmaker, which really shows in this film, as he brings a striking visual sensibility and an excellent eye for detail. Thirst is a unique and great vampire film with plenty to satisfy fans of bloody and gothic romance stories.

1 'Let the Right One In' (2008)

Directed by tomas alfredson.

Lina Leandersson as Eli, a girl covered in blood in 'Let the Right One In'

Let the Right One In is a 2008 Swedish coming-of-age vampire horror film directed by Thomas Alfredson and

adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his 2004 novel. The film centers on the friendship and budding romance between an introverted young boy named Oskar ( Kåre Hedebrant ) and a vampire named Eli ( Lina Leandersson ). While the dynamic between the two is very sweet, things are greatly complicated by Oskar's problems and Eli's need to feed on human blood to survive.

One of the best Nordic horror films ever made, the film centers on themes of queerness and isolation through its portrayal of two loners finding connection and community with each other . Visually beautiful with its chilly landscape and rich color grade, the film is a gorgeous and gruesome feast for the eyes. Let the Right One In is a sensitive and spooky gothic romance with extremely likable lead characters.

Let the Right One In

NEXT: The 20 Best Horror Movies That Explore Sexuality

COMMENTS

Zola movie review & film summary (2021)
When Zola (Taylour Paige) meets Stefani (Riley Keough), while waiting on her at a sports bar (the original was a Hooters), there's an instant connection.You could say that Stefani "love bombs" Zola, overwhelming her with compliments. Stefani is clearly a mess (later in the film, Zola yells at her: "YOUR BRAIN IS BROKE!") and her exaggerated accent is put-on and culturally ...
Zola
Zola | Rotten Tomatoes. Zola. R Released Jun 30, 2021 1h 27m Comedy Mystery & Thriller Drama. TRAILER for Zola: Trailer 1. List. 88% Tomatometer 255 Reviews. 68% Popcornmeter 250+ Verified Ratings ...
Zola
For most of its running time, Zola is as thrilling as any big-budget superhero epic. Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 10, 2022. James Croot Stuff.co.nz. A slick, thoroughly contemporary ...
'Zola' Review: A Twitter Thread Turns Into A Fever Dream On Film
In 2015, a Detroit waitress and exotic dancer named A'Ziah "Zola" King crafted a viral, vivid 148-tweet thread recounting a wild trip she took to Tampa, Fla. upon an invitation from Jessica, a ...
'Zola' Review: Twitter? I Hardly Know Her!
Running Time. 1h 30m. Genres. Comedy, Crime, Drama. Movie data powered by IMDb.com. A.O. Scott is a critic at large and the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for ...
"Zola," Reviewed: A Twitter Thread Takes an Ingenious and Audacious
Richard Brody reviews Janicza Bravo's "Zola," a movie about the perils of sex work which stars Taylour Paige and Riley Keough. ... "Zola" is in part a road-trip movie, and Bravo thrills ...
Zola Review: A Savvy Black Stripper Holds the Power
Janicza Bravo's provocative new film, based on an infamous 2015 Twitter thread by A'Ziah "Zola" King, unpacks sex work, personal agency, and Black womanhood.
'Zola' Is a Wild Road Trip Movie That Works Against All Odds
Unsurprisingly, this prose poem of stripper life went viral. With Zola, Bravo captures the brashness of King's voice and turns it into a movie that works against all odds, a black comedy and ...
Zola movie review: Whirlwind of sex and violence starring Taylour Paige
Zola is about as modern as film-making gets. It takes its inspiration from a series of tweets posted by Detroit-based exotic dancer A'Ziah "Zola" King in 2015, now considered a masterclass ...
Zola
Zola (Taylour Paige), a Detroit waitress, strikes up a new friendship with a customer, Stefani (Riley Keough), who seduces her to join a weekend of dancing and partying in Florida. What at first seems like a glamorous trip full of "hoeism" rapidly transforms into a 48-hour journey involving a nameless pimp, an idiot boyfriend, some Tampa gangsters and other unexpected adventures in this ...
Zola Movie Review
Zola, it seems, is a movie that wants to change that. But it does so by glamorizing the non-consensual situations Zola finds herself in -- sex trafficking, kidnapping, gun violence. Zola and Stefani are shown perfectly coiffed, fashionably styled, and sometimes exhibiting Kardashian-level calmness as they navigate serious situations.
Zola (film)
Zola is a 2020 American black comedy crime film directed by Janicza Bravo and co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O. Harris.It is based on a viral Twitter thread from 2015 by A'Ziah "Zola" King and the resulting Rolling Stone article "Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted" by David Kushner.Starring Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, and Colman ...
Zola Review
An impactful cast maintain the film's frenetic pace. The film opens like a romantic fantasy. Composer Mica Levi's fluttering harp motif evokes a butterfly-in-your-belly feel as two women fall ...
Trust Me, Zola Might Just Be the Wittiest and Wildest Movie of 2021
Based on the infamous 148-tweet thread, the film follows a Detroit waitress as she gets swept up in what becomes one of the wildest moments of her life thanks to a sex worker named Stefani and her ...
'Zola' movie review: Film based on viral Twitter thread makes for a
Review by Ann Hornaday. June 30, 2021 at 10:00 a.m. EDT (3.5 stars) ... "Zola" is a disorienting movie by design. For anyone tempted simply to laugh along, remember this: Underneath a woman ...
'Zola' Review: Janicza Bravo's Tweetstorm Tornado
Zola grows increasingly wary and annoyed as she realizes the caliber of screw-ups she's traveling with, and Keough does a masterful job of chipping away at the whatever-you-call-the-opposite-of ...
Zola (2020)
Zola: Directed by Janicza Bravo. With Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nelcie Souffrant, Nasir Rahim. A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild road trip to Florida.
Zola Movie Review: This Is About More Than Just a Wild Weekend Gone
The resulting movie tells the autobiographical story of Zola (played by Taylour Paige), a waitress and exotic dancer who embarks on a road trip to Tampa with a new friend, Stefani (Riley Keough ...
Zola review: A slick, seedy Florida odyessy
Zola is a slick, seedy Florida odyssey. The new movie brings a viral tweetstorm to life with absurdist, madcap glee. Riley Keough and Taylour Paige in Zola. Constance Grady is a senior ...
'Zola' Review: Janicza Bravo Turns a Wild Twitter Thread into an
Zola is a wild story with style to spare, but it's got a beating heart beneath its tweets. Based on a Twitter thread from October 2015 by A'Ziah "Zola" King ( Taylour Paige ), the story ...
'Zola' Review
'Zola': Film Review | Sundance 2020. Taylour Paige and Riley Keough star in 'Zola,' a wild odyssey through the Florida flesh trade, based on one woman's epic Twitter rant that went viral in 2015.
'Zola' Movie Review
Zola Is a Magnetizing Stripper Road Trip Movie Ripped From a Real Life Viral Tweet Thread One of the most talked about films at Sundance takes on a bizarre mostly-true story that began as a 2015 ...
Zola Movie Review
Zola may be the first twitter thread-to-movie adaptation, or at least the first that's made a splash. Director Bravo, with co-screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), has translated it into a semi-coherent, good-looking movie. Shot in the same pastel, trash-glam palette as Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, it's another entry in the ...
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The Deliverance Review
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Crimson Peak is a 2015 supernatural gothic romance directed by Guillermo del Toro and co-written by del Toro and Matthew Robbins.Set at the turn of the 20th century, it follows a young woman named ...