Jennifer Lopez is not one of those actresses who disappears into a role. For one, she’s too famous to allow the audience to separate artist from character entirely. Often, those characters, whether Selena or in last year’s “Unstoppable” as a sports mom, are extensions of her persona, astral projections of her stature as a global pop superstar into a fantasy movie world that depends on her song-and-dance gifts. For another, a Jennifer Lopez joint is always more about her presence — her name on the marquee, her face under the big bright lights — than her skills in vanishing inside a character.
Writer/director Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a new screen version of the John Kander and Fred Ebb Broadway musical itself inspired by Manuel Puig’s novel and Héctor Babenco’s 1985 Oscar winner, could do no better casting than Lopez as Ingrid Luna, a fictional screen siren and Latin American version of a Golden Age of Hollywood actress. Ingrid exists only as a figment in the imagination of Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay prisoner in politically fraught 1983 Argentina, who recounts to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna) the plot of a movie starring her as Aurora. Lopez gets the mother of all airbrushing jobs in the film’s musical sequences, which are shot, perhaps unusually in 2025, like an old-school Hollywood musical — and not like, say, 2002’s flashy “Chicago,” the John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Bob Fosse musical adaptation written by Condon and directed by Rob Marshall. That film relied on zooms, close-ups, and harsh cuts on bodies, whereas the metafictional “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” musical scenes are shot stagelike, with actors like Lopez, Tonatiuh, and Luna in the frame top to toe.
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But there’s something stilted and stale about the presentation, especially when contrasted with the more staid, plainly shot, coverage-like handheld sequences back in the movie’s present-day in that prison cell. Tonatiuh (known for the TV series “Vida” and “Promised Land” and last year’s Netflix streaming smash “Carry-On”) gives an earnestly star-making performance as the flamboyant and reverie-prone Luis, restoring the tale’s Latin American roots after William Hurt played him to an Oscar win in 1986.
But what’s a star-making performance when the package surrounding the actor is otherwise so ordinary and un-cosmic? Lopez, while impressive as a vamping, dreamed-up screen star in the silhouette of Rita Hayworth or any other pin-up you’d too have plastered on the walls of your prison cell if you were a gay Hollywood-movie obsessive, doesn’t get the chance to do anything risky or vulnerable. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a flashy ode to the fairies and the radicals, the maricóns who’ve repurposed their oppression and media literacy into an outsize, fuck-if-I-care-what-you-think political identity. Yet there’s nothing revolutionary about the movie that contains them.
In a grimy torture complex of a Buenos Aires prison as military dictatorship rages in the outside world, Luis is locked up for public indecency, while Valentin is behind bars for his participation in a leftist revolutionary group trying to topple the government. (The president alluded to in Puig’s 1975-set novel was Juan Perón, though the date change here places dictator Reynaldo Bignone as the head of state.) Luis has been brought there as a spy, cooperating with officials to extract intel from Valentin about the group; in exchange, Luis will get a reduced sentence and endless luscious provisions to share with Valentin. Like Roxie Hart in “Chicago” or Sally Bowles in “Cabaret,” Luis escapes into a fantasy world far-flung from the shit-stained cell where he and Valentin share a dirty toilet. He brings Valentin into his imaginative retellings of a grand Ingrid Luna classic in which she plays both the diva Aurora and a Spider Woman whose kiss can kill.
Lopez’s Spider Woman gets a bad pixie wig and even more garish goth costuming appropriate for a bewitching, bitchy succubus. But I’m not sure how tuned into the project’s camp potential Condon ever is, or if he’s ready to endorse that this movie-within-the-movie might actually be bad. The gay director of “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters” (still his best film, and another Hollywood metafictional story, that time about flaming “Frankenstein” director James Whale) isn’t incapable of a campy touch, but it’s never applied here in a film that prefers to take its source materials more seriously, a more straight-faced, quote-unquote handsomely mounted Oscar kind of movie.
‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’Courtesy of Sundance Institute.
Meanwhile, those Ingrid Luna musical sequences — and the songs are unfortunately (sorry) hardly memorable — are decked out in a throwback architectural style that mixes art deco and art nouveau, with production designer Scott Chambliss relishing in plastic furniture and cotton-candy-colored duvet covers. Musicals like “Wicked,” for better or worse, have upped the game in terms of in-camera singing, and the vocals here often feel overproduced and autotuned, but I suppose that’s in step with the movie’s old-Hollywood ambitions. The plot of Ingrid Luna’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” movie-within-the-movie, meanwhile, is a thinly shaped romantic melodrama that also features Tonatiuh and Diego Luna taking on roles. One wants to fuck her, the other wants to be her, and you can guess who the latter is: Back in the prison cell, Luis opens up to Valentin about identifying more with women than his own male body, though Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” only superficially digs into Luis’ transness, a plot kink uncoiling to nowhere except to contextualize Luis’ presenting femininity. He dresses in loosely draped shrugs and robes, a sharp opposite to Valentin’s more machismo-bound self, but the latter is hiding gay shame of his own.
As in the novel and the musical, the two eventually become lovers, though not explicitly until a rushed sex scene in the film’s final act, so hastily implausible in its physical particulars (if you know, you know, because here’s another movie where gay men can just stick it in without any preamble) that it too feels like a fantasy. The most intimate moment shared between the men involves Valentin having, uh, sudden explosive diarrhea due to the prison wardens poisoning his food to get him to talk. It’s a foul but oddly tender exchange as Luis cleans him up and helps hide Valentin’s condition, a sickness that takes Valentin to the inevitable rock bottom of finally opening up about his personal and political lives. Tonatiuh and Diego Luna certainly have an absorbing chemistry, one as a nurturing femme and the other a macho revolutionary, and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is most interesting when it braids those opposing archetypes together, Luis and Valentin sharing more in common than they’d ever thought. But these scenes grow claustrophobic, and perhaps that’s by design, making us desperate to get back into Ingrid Luna land.
There aren’t that many true divas left in the world, so Lopez, a U.S.-born Latina ever adept at shapeshifting for any role that demands singing and dancing, is probably the only person to play Ingrid Luna right about now. Ingrid is meant to be an out-of-this-world-sized star, one who maybe only exists in our dreams. Lopez is one of those stars who hovers just above the ground, rarely coming down to Earth (even in “Hustlers,” her most decorated performance, she’s just a bit out of reach in that fur coat as a veteran stripper mentoring ingenues). That makes sense for untouchable contract star Luna, but her casting only underscores yet again the ordinariness of the construction of the film’s back-to-planet-Earth prison scenes. That’s a contrast Condon wants to conjure, but it only leaves us dreaming of a better screen dream.
Grade: C+
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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