‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Movie Review: An Uneven But Ambitious and Dazzling Musical Adaptation
Photo from Roadside Attractions
From Jeremy Kibler
Come for the Technicolor razzle-dazzle and stay for the tragic queer love story. Kiss of the Spider Woman is the second adaptation of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, first taken to screen as a 1985 non-musical (which won William Hurt an Oscar playing opposite Raul Julia) from Terrence McNally’s stage play, but it’s the inaugural adaptation of the 1993 stage musical. For what sounds like a copy of a copy of a copy, this version can be joyous when it isn’t being unflinching. Adapted and directed by Bill Condon (who has the movie musical chops between adapting Chicago to the screen and directing Dreamgirls), Kiss of the Spider Woman battles with its own structure on screen from time to time, but where it counts, this is a stirring love letter to the powerful escapism of imagination and art during dark times.
In war-torn Argentina during Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1983, flamboyant window dresser Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is thrown into prison for public indecency. To have his sentence shortened, he’s made an informer, hired by the warden to extract revolutionary intel on his cellmate, political prisoner Valentín (Diego Luna). While Valentín prefers to keep to himself and read, Molina isn’t shy about his enthusiasm for the movies and gorgeous movie star Ingrid Luna (a captivating Jennifer Lopez). To pass the time and distract from their hellish conditions, he vividly recounts to Valentín the silver-screen diva’s admittedly flawed B-movie musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” Valentín hates movies where characters sing and dance, but dreaming is their only liberation from the bleak environment besides love.
No matter how overlong it starts to feel and how uneven it can be with big tonal shifts, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a grandly ambitious entertainment. The John Kander and Fred Ebb music isn’t always of the toe-tapping variety, but “Where You Are” is an undeniable show-stopper, paying homage to Bob Fosse, as is the seductive titular number. In the rather nonsensical movie-within-the-movie (which looks like the product of Ed Wood making a big-budget musical), Lopez is playing Ingrid Luna playing South African fashion editor Aurora, as well as the jungle-dwelling temptress known as the Spider Woman. As Molina recounts his cinematic favorite, both he and Valentín play parts within that movie as this is their shared escape from the miserable reality.
Since it’s called Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jennifer Lopez is the star attraction here. She does triple-duty, acting, singing and dancing, and she is game for all of it. Though all three parts exist more as melodrama-leaning ideas than fully formed characters, Lopez remains luminous and alluring, cementing her superstar status. Diego Luna is dependably nuanced as Valentín, too, but the film really does belong to Tonatiuh, who devastates in a star-making performance. He is a total find, bringing a sensitivity, charisma and a sense of humor, and a tender heart and soul to Molina, who identifies most with Ingrid Luna’s leading lady.
When the film is being a splashy, vibrantly colored musical, it dazzles. There’s a true MGM musical feel to the staging of the numbers, shot and edited in such a way where the dancing can be appreciated head-to-toe. The production design is exquisite, and the costume design by Colleen Atwood and Christine L. Cantella is first-rate. There is so much joy and exuberance during these lively, spectacle-heavy sequences, but both stories never intersect as seamlessly as they should.
Perhaps it just feels more magnified on screen rather than on the stage, but the disparate tones and the rooting interest in both stories never quite match. While the prison framework can’t help but be less interesting to look at, it does have the story that actually matters. Impassioned performances and a lovely chemistry between Tonatiuh and Diego Luna bring an emotional intimacy that makes us care about their relationship, leveling out the frivolous but eye-popping fantasia. Until the very end with Tonatiuh’s number “Only in the Movies,” the kitschy, campy earnestness inside the fake movie always exists in isolation next to the grimy grimness of the central prison story (which comes with diarrhea but does still welcome moments of levity).
Emotionally involving on one hand and rapturous on the other, Kiss of the Spider Woman feels a little, well, tangled on the whole, but it is one of the most soulful and loving tributes to Old Hollywood in recent memory.
Rating: 3/5
Kiss of the Spider Woman hits theaters on October 10, 2025.
