Jennifer Lopez Is not one of the actresses who disappear into a role. First, she is too known to allow the audience to completely distinguish artist from character. Often, these characters, regardless of the Selena or in last year’s “Unstoppable“As a sports mother, extensions of her persona, astral projections of her body image as a global pop-star star are in a fantasy 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 tent, her face under the great bright lights – than her skills to disappear into a character.
Author/director Bill Condons’Kiss of the Spider Woman“, A new film version by John Kander and Fred Ebb Broadway Musical himself inspired by Manuel Puig’s novel and Héctor Babenco’s Oscar winner in 1985, could not make any better role crews than Lopez as Ingrid Luna, a fictional screen and Latin American version of a Golden Hollywood-spectator age. Ingrid only exists as an invention in the imagination of Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay prisoner in the politically loaded Argentina in 1983, who tells her cell mate Valentin (Diego Luna) the action in a movie with her as Aurora. Lopez gets the mother of all airbrushing jobs in filmMusical sequences, which are recorded, perhaps unusual in 2025, as an old -fashioned Hollywood musical – and not as, say, 2002’s flashy “Chicago”, John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse Musical Adaptation Written by Condon and directed by Rob Marshall . That movie relied on zooms, close -ups and hard cuts on bodies, while the metafiktive “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” musical scenes are recorded scenic, with actors such as Lopez, Tonatiuh and Luna in the frame from top to toe.
But there is somewhat enchanted and uncle with the presentation, especially in contrast to the more stable, clearly shot, coverage -like hand -held sequences back in the film’s present in that prison cell. Tonatiuh (known for the TV series “Vida” and “Promised Land” and last year’s Netflix-Streaming-Smash “Carry-On”) provides a sincere star production such as the Flamboyante and dreamy Luis, and restores the saga’s Latin American roots after William Hurt played him to an Oscar gain 1986.
But what is a star -forming performance when the package around the actor is otherwise so ordinary and uncosmic? Although Lopez impressed as a vampy, dreamed movie star in the silhouette of Rita Hayworth or any other Pin-Up that you would also have paste on the walls of your prison cell if you were a gay Hollywood movie obsessed, don’t make it a chance to do anything risky or vulnerable. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a flashy ode to the elves and the radical Gays who has transformed its oppression and media expertise into a great, fuck-if-bry-what-you-go political identity. Yet there is nothing revolutionary with the film that contains them.
In a dirty torture complex in a Buenos Aires prison when military dictatorship rages in the outside world, Luis Luis in public independence, while Valentin sits behind locks and booms for its participation in a revolutionary left group trying to overthrow the government. (The president, who was sneezed in Puig’s novel from 1975, was Juan Perón, although the date change here places the dictator Reynaldo Bignone as head of state.) Luis has been brought there as a spy and collaborates with officials to obtain information from Valentin about group; In exchange, Luis receives a reduced penalty and endless delicious supplies to share with valentine. Like Roxie Hart in “Chicago” or Sally Bowles in “Cabaret” Luis flees into a fantasy world far away from the shit -packed cell where he and Valentin share a dirty toilet. He brings Valentin in his imaginative renovations of a grand Ingrid Luna classic where she plays both the divan Aurora and a spider woman whose kiss can kill.
Lopez’s Spider Woman gets a bad Nissepruk and even more cruel goth costume suitable for an enchanting, bitchy succubus. But I’m not sure how set the project’s camp potential Condon ever, or whether he is ready to support that this movie-in-movie can actually be bad. The gay director of “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters” (still his best film, and another Hollywood-metafictive story, that time about the flaming “Frankenstein” director James Whale) is not incapable of a campy touch, but it Has never been applied here in a movie that prefers to take its source material more seriously, a more straight face, quote-without quote beautifully mounted Oscar movie.
At the same time, these Ingrid Luna’s musical sequences – and the songs are unfortunately (sorry) are hardly memorable – decorated in a retrospective architectural style that mixes Art Deco and Art Nouveau, with production designer Scott Chambliss that enjoys plastic furniture and sugar candy. the duvet cover. Musicals like “wicked”, for good and bad, have raised the game when it comes to singing in the camera, and the song here often feels overproduced and autotuned, but I guess it is in line with the film’s old Hollywood ambitions. The action in Ingrid Luna’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” movie-in-film is at the same time a thinly format romantic melodrama that also contains tonatiuh and Diego Luna that takes 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 for Valentin to identify more with women than his own male body, even if Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman ”only digs superficially in Luis Transness, an intrigue that rolls up to nowhere except to contextualize Lui’s presenting femininity. Own gay comb.
As in the novel and the musical, the two eventually become lovers, but not explicitly until a quick sex scene in the last act of the film, so rapidly unlikely in their physical details (if you know, you know, because here is another movie where gay men can only Insert it without any preamble) that it also feels like a fantasy. The most intimate moment shared between men means that Valentine suddenly gets explosive diarrhea because the prison guards poisoned his food to make him talk. It is a ugly but strange tender exchange when Luis cleanses him and helps to hide the state of valentine, a disease that takes valentine to the inevitable bottom to finally open up about his personal and political life. Tonatiuh and Diego Luna really have an absorbent chemistry, one as a nourishing femme and the other a macho revolutionary, and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is most interesting when it intertwines the opposite archetypes, Luis and Valentin share more in common than they had ever thought. But these scenes become claustrophobic, and maybe it is designed, which makes us desperate to get back to Ingrid Luna’s land.
There are not so many real divids left in the world, so Lopez, a US-born Latina that is ever skilled at changing form for any role that requires singing and dance, is probably the only person playing Ingrid Luna right now. Ingrid is supposed to be a star that is not in this world, one that may only exist in our dreams. Lopez is one of the stars that float just above the ground and rarely come down to earth (even in “Hustlers”, her most decorated performance, she is just a little out of reach of the fur coat as a veteran strip as mentorship). It makes sense for the untouchable contract star Luna, but her role crew emphasizes only once again the usual in the construction of the film’s back-to-planet-ground prison scenes. It is a contrast that Condon wants to evoke, but it just makes us dream of a better screen dream.
Rating: C+
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution in the United States.
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