And best of all, it is exactly 90 minutes long!
Released in cinemas in August 2021, it is totally understandable if you’ve never heard of this movie before.
Zola ended up on JOE’s Best Movies of 2021 list, and probably remains the movie on that list that the least number of people have seen.
In our review when it first arrived on the big screen, we called it “the coolest movie of 2021”, and we’ve been patiently waiting for it to arriving on a streaming service since then.
We’re happy to announce that time has finally come!
It might also be the first ever movie based entirely on a story told on social media, kicking off with a tweet saying “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense”, which then built out to a 148-tweet thread.
That was adapted into a pitch-black comedy based on a true story of Zola, a waitress (Taylour Paige) who heads to Florida alongside a stripper (Riley Keough) with the promise of making a quick buck at the clubs there.
It soon descends into a manic tale of prostitution, murder and blackmail, while never being anything less than breathlessly entertaining and very often laugh-out-loud funny.
And of course, we weren’t the only ones to love the movie:
The Wrap – “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.”
Los Angeles Times – “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.”
The New Yorker – “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.”
Zola is available to watch with a NOW Cinema Membership right now.
Clip via Sony UK
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