Zola
A24 | Release Date: June 30, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
76
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 46 Critic Reviews
Positive:
40
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinAug 6, 2021
At the very end of Janicza Bravo’s Zola, just as you’re struggling to comprehend what on earth the film is supposed to amount to, there is a wonderful moment when you realise that’s the entire point. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshJul 1, 2021
Zola’s authorship and Bravo’s respect for her storytelling make Zola a wholly original experience. It’s a brutally honest account of sex work, often dangerous and infrequently sexy, punctuated with Zola’s one-liners, observations and recounting of laugh-out-loud moments. Read full review
95
TheWrapYolanda MachadoJun 29, 2021
Zola feels utterly contemporary but will no doubt be examined for decades to come, as a marker of both this particularly crazy time in history and of the moment that social media became self-aware. Whip-smart, funny, complicated, and just plain wild, Zola is 90 minutes of brilliance. Read full review
91
Original-CinKim HughesJun 30, 2021
There is a bristling, neon energy to Zola which, given its provenance as a series of real-life tweets from waitress and exotic dancer (and now executive producer) A’ziah “Zola” King, seems about right. This is a road trip movie straight outta weirdsville. Read full review
91
ConsequenceClint WorthingtonJan 30, 2020
Zola‘s not without its faults. The script is a little too loosy-goosy for its own good, and the last 10-15 minutes are admittedly a lackluster resolution to the high-tension hijinks on display. But until that point, it’s downright thrilling to watch a film breeze through its grimly funny energy with such exuberant confidence, especially with such a new, vibrant voice in Paige. Read full review
90
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJun 29, 2021
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. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJul 7, 2021
A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJul 1, 2021
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. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayJun 30, 2021
Despite its unconventional source material, it turns out to be surprisingly well-crafted, elevated by breathtaking central performances and the stylish, slyly knowing sensibility of director Janicza Bravo. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineChuck BowenJun 30, 2021
Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves. Read full review
86
Paste MagazineJacob OllerJun 29, 2021
It’s a movie by a Black woman about a Black woman (that barely, blessedly avoided being directed by James Franco) that doesn’t just capture a nuanced and specific experience, but the rollicking and resonant digital audience that initially embraced it. Read full review
85
Vanity FairRichard LawsonJan 25, 2020
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. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJessica KiangJan 25, 2020
Empowering, saddening, amusing and aggravating in roughly equal measure, with a very small side order of social critique, Bravo’s film marks a huge step up for her and a definitive answer to the question that @_zolarmoon posed to Twitter in October of 2015: yes, y’all do wanna hear the story about why she and this bitch here fell out!!!!!!!! Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnJan 25, 2020
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. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJan 25, 2020
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. Read full review
80
The AtlanticShirley LiAug 25, 2021
With Zola, however, the director Janicza Bravo has made a film that contends with the uneasy interplay between characters’ online and offline selves. And it posits that we use the internet to fool ourselves as much as to fool others. Read full review
80
Time OutAlice SavilleAug 10, 2021
Bravo’s movie is so pacy, so compelling that it doesn’t quite have space to land the full horror of Zola and Stefani’s situation. But what it does do is demonstrate that telling your story is a kind of performance, just like stripping is. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeAug 9, 2021
What makes this particular adaptation, co-written by Bravo and Jeremy O Harris, sing is the fact that, while it winks at Twitter with a smattering of emojis, it’s the legitimacy of Zola’s voice, rather than the means of its dissemination, which is prioritised. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeAug 6, 2021
Time will tell if the social media thread is set to become the epic poem of the new millennium. For now, Zola feels like a triumphant lunge into fresh territory. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawAug 4, 2021
Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media. Read full review
80
VoxConstance GradyJul 8, 2021
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. Read full review
80
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah-Tai BlackJul 8, 2021
Bravo’s style echoes King’s own: It is fun and whimsical, formally playful, sometimes bordering on the fantastic but always grounded in the real and the intimate. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsJul 6, 2021
Bravo, abetted by a cast that couldn’t be more game, turns a classic case of “These white people will be the death of me” — a familiar idea among the rest of us, I think — into a dazzling, once-every-blue-moon experiment in how to tell an utterly modern, utterly mediated, confusing, offbeat story. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreJun 30, 2021
The film is about the power of storytelling, and not in the cornball, self-congratulatory sense in which that phrase is normally deployed. Read full review
80
SlateKaren HanJun 28, 2021
Like the thread it’s based on, it’s easy to rush through, even if does visit some darker places. It’s only if you pause for a moment, and linger on it, that you might wish there were more. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyJan 25, 2020
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. Her self-possession is a thing of beauty. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleSelome HailuJun 30, 2021
Presumably the first ever feature film adapted from a Twitter thread, Zola makes use of the graphics and sound effects of the internet, as has been common in film for the past several years. But there’s more depth to it here given the context. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJun 30, 2021
A hilariously dark and dirty road comedy built on a stripper’s “my hand to God this happened” tweets. Read full review
75
USA TodayBrian TruittJun 29, 2021
Oftentimes, the original book is better than its movie version. And while King’s tweetstorm is an infamous Homeric odyssey in the world of 280 characters, Zola is a solid spin, vividly capturing a stripper saga that would have been harrowing to live through, but is fun to sit back and witness. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJun 29, 2021
In all ways, it’s unexpected — in its subject, in its treatment of its subject, and in its whole look and feel. It’s an original and interesting movie. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJun 29, 2021
The result is a raw and sometimes chilling and often darkly funny adventure filled with just enough nods to social media, e.g., we sometimes hear the familiar Twitter sound effect when something is posted. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrJun 29, 2021
A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubShannon MillerJun 28, 2021
Zola is first and foremost a zany, catastrophic road-trip dramedy, one that balances the whimsy of social media with the harrowing reality of being trapped in a dangerous situation. Read full review
75
The VergeAdi RobertsonFeb 25, 2020
While the film doesn’t disguise its origin as a Twitter thread, it generally doesn’t treat it as a gimmick, either — because in 2020, the internet is just where people share the weirdest, funniest, and most frightening moments of their lives. Read full review
75
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaJan 25, 2020
It’s crass, it’s cruel, it’s wild, it’s often hilariously funny. Read full review
75
The Film StageJordan RaupJan 25, 2020
Accompanied by Mica Levi’s score–which mixes fairytale-esque harps to introduce the story and Southern-fried beats and synths as the craziness progresses–Bravo elevates the material and provides a unified, eccentric vision. Read full review
70
TimeStephanie ZacharekJun 25, 2021
Zola’s comic absurdities are entwined with its horrors in a way that almost shouldn’t work. But Bravo—who co-wrote the script with actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris—shows a lightness of touch in navigating the story’s quicksilver tone shifts, and the movie’s two leads bring their best. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJun 22, 2021
Things go a little haywire at the end of the film when the story falls apart a bit — endings are tough, on Twitter and in theaters. But till then, it’s a non-stop thrill. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJan 25, 2020
As funny and ferocious as much of Zola is, it’s let down by an increasingly haphazard script that doesn’t know how to either sustain its humor or negotiate its turn into darker territory — and so, disappointingly, it waffles. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Jan 27, 2020
The performances are a hoot . . . . But the film has perspective problems that extend beyond the slightly queasy, half-comic depiction of sex work. Read full review
60
EmpireHanna FlintAug 3, 2021
Bravo stylishly delivers a dreamlike odyssey with slick, character-driven performances full of conviction, but that courage dissipates by the final act with nary enough steam to power a satisfying ending for its eponymous hero. Read full review
60
Screen DailyAnthony KaufmanJan 25, 2020
It’s ultimately unsatisfying—more style than substance. Read full review
60
The GuardianBenjamin LeeJan 25, 2020
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. Read full review
50
The Associated PressLindsey BahrJun 30, 2021
Taylour Paige is phenomenal, for one. The movie, though, is a bold and admirable experiment that doesn’t totally work. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 30, 2021
There is plenty of drama, and some hard feelings . . . but not a lot of intrigue or honest emotion. I guess if that’s what you’re after, it’s best to stick to Twitter. Read full review
50
VarietyPeter DebrugeJan 25, 2020
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. Read full review
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