Taylour Paige (White Boy Rick) and Riley Keough (The Lodge) lead this Sundance comedy based on a twitter thread depicting two strippers whose road trip to Florida takes a series of wild turns. As the lead character's igniting tweet states: "You wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense."
88%246 reviews
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.
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The Twitter-to-screen adaptation of Zola is as scrappy and imperfect as the original story but just as likable. There’s something unusually compelling about what Bravo does with the material that makes up for its missteps.
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The performances are a hoot... But the film has perspective problems that extend beyond the slightly queasy, half-comic depiction of sex work.
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More or less playing straight man to Keough's comically unflappable liability, the incandescent Paige conveys the disappointment, even disdain, of Zola for a woman she believed was a friend, but also subtly introduces notes of poignancy as she figures out ways to stay safe in the stickiest situations.
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If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.
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Director Janicza Bravo’s zany road trip comedy about a pair of strippers on a rambunctious 48-hour Florida adventure embodies its ludicrous source while jazzing it up with relentless cinematic beats.
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Though premised on the slight pretenses of Twitter, the world of Bravo’s film is no fictionalized, seedily appealing underbelly. It’s simply America: often frightful, sometimes grimly amusing, and ever rattling along in its entropy.
Full reviewZola is available to stream in New Zealand now on Neon Rentals and Academy On Demand and AroVision.
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