Jennifer Lopez shouldn’t be a kind of actresses who disappears into a task. For one, she’s too well-known to permit the viewers to separate artist from character solely. Typically, these characters, whether or not Selena or in final yr’s “Unstoppable” as a sports activities mother, are extensions of her persona, astral projections of her stature as a worldwide pop celebrity right into a fantasy film world that depends upon her song-and-dance items. For an additional, a Jennifer Lopez joint is all the time extra about her presence — her identify on the marquee, her face beneath the large vibrant lights — than her expertise in vanishing inside a personality.
Author/director Invoice Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Lady,” a brand new display model of the John Kander and Fred Ebb Broadway musical itself impressed by Manuel Puig’s novel and Héctor Babenco’s 1985 Oscar winner, may do no higher casting than Lopez as Ingrid Luna, a fictional display siren and Latin American model of a Golden Age of Hollywood actress. Ingrid exists solely as a figment within the creativeness of Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a homosexual prisoner in politically fraught 1983 Argentina, who recounts to his cellmate Valentin (Diego Luna) the plot of a film starring her as Aurora. Lopez will get the mom of all airbrushing jobs within the movie‘s musical sequences, that are shot, maybe unusually in 2025, like an old-school Hollywood musical — and never 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 movie relied on zooms, close-ups, and harsh cuts on our bodies, whereas the metafictional “Kiss of the Spider Lady’s” musical scenes are shot stagelike, with actors like Lopez, Tonatiuh, and Luna within the body prime to toe.
However there’s one thing stilted and rancid concerning the presentation, particularly when contrasted with the extra staid, plainly shot, coverage-like handheld sequences again within the film’s present-day in that jail cell. Tonatiuh (recognized for the TV collection “Vida” and “Promised Land” and final yr’s Netflix streaming smash “Carry-On”) offers an earnestly star-making efficiency because the flamboyant and reverie-prone Luis, restoring the story’s Latin American roots after William Harm performed him to an Oscar win in 1986.
However what’s a star-making efficiency when the package deal surrounding the actor is in any other case so unusual and un-cosmic? Lopez, whereas spectacular as a vamping, dreamed-up display star within the silhouette of Rita Hayworth or every other pin-up you’d too have plastered on the partitions of your jail cell if you happen to have been a homosexual Hollywood-movie obsessive, doesn’t get the possibility to do something dangerous or susceptible. “Kiss of the Spider Lady” 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 identification. But there’s nothing revolutionary concerning the film that accommodates them.
In a dirty torture complicated of a Buenos Aires jail as navy dictatorship rages within the exterior world, Luis is locked up for public indecency, whereas Valentin is behind bars for his participation in a leftist revolutionary group attempting to topple the federal government. (The president alluded to in Puig’s 1975-set novel was Juan Perón, although the date change right here locations dictator Reynaldo Bignone as the pinnacle of state.) Luis has been introduced there as a spy, cooperating with officers to extract intel from Valentin concerning the group; in alternate, Luis will get a decreased sentence and infinite luscious provisions to share with Valentin. Like Roxie Hart in “Chicago” or Sally Bowles in “Cabaret,” Luis escapes right into a fantasy world far-flung from the shit-stained cell the place he and Valentin share a unclean rest room. He brings Valentin into his imaginative retellings of a grand Ingrid Luna basic wherein she performs each the diva Aurora and a Spider Lady whose kiss can kill.
Lopez’s Spider Lady will get a foul pixie wig and much more garish goth costuming acceptable for a bewitching, bitchy succubus. However I’m undecided how tuned into the mission’s camp potential Condon ever is, or if he’s able to endorse that this movie-within-the-movie would possibly truly be dangerous. The homosexual director of “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters” (nonetheless his finest movie, and one other Hollywood metafictional story, that point about flaming “Frankenstein” director James Whale) isn’t incapable of a campy contact, but it surely’s by no means utilized right here in a movie that prefers to take its supply supplies extra critically, a extra straight-faced, quote-unquote handsomely mounted Oscar type of film.
In the meantime, these Ingrid Luna musical sequences — and the songs are sadly (sorry) hardly memorable — are decked out in a throwback architectural type that mixes artwork deco and artwork nouveau, with manufacturing designer Scott Chambliss relishing in plastic furnishings and cotton-candy-colored cover covers. Musicals like “Depraved,” for higher or worse, have upped the sport when it comes to in-camera singing, and the vocals right here typically really feel overproduced and autotuned, however I suppose that’s in keeping with the film’s old-Hollywood ambitions. The plot of Ingrid Luna’s “Kiss of the Spider Lady” movie-within-the-movie, in the meantime, is a thinly formed romantic melodrama that additionally options Tonatiuh and Diego Luna taking over roles. One desires to fuck her, the opposite desires to be her, and you may guess who the latter is: Again within the jail cell, Luis opens as much as Valentin about figuring out extra with girls than his personal male physique, although Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Lady” solely superficially digs into Luis’ transness, a plot kink uncoiling to nowhere besides to contextualize Luis’ presenting femininity. He clothes in loosely draped shrugs and robes, a pointy reverse to Valentin’s extra machismo-bound self, however the latter is hiding homosexual disgrace of his personal.
As within the novel and the musical, the 2 finally turn out to be lovers, although not explicitly till a rushed intercourse scene within the movie’s last act, so rapidly implausible in its bodily particulars (if you already know, you already know, as a result of right here’s one other film the place homosexual males can simply stick it in with none preamble) that it too appears like a fantasy. Essentially the most intimate second shared between the boys entails Valentin having, uh, sudden explosive diarrhea because of the jail wardens poisoning his meals to get him to speak. It’s a foul however oddly tender alternate as Luis cleans him up and helps cover Valentin’s situation, a illness that takes Valentin to the inevitable all-time low of lastly opening up about his private and political lives. Tonatiuh and Diego Luna actually have an absorbing chemistry, one as a nurturing femme and the opposite a macho revolutionary, and “Kiss of the Spider Lady” is most attention-grabbing when it braids these opposing archetypes collectively, Luis and Valentin sharing extra in widespread than they’d ever thought. However these scenes develop claustrophobic, and maybe that’s by design, making us determined to get again into Ingrid Luna land.
There aren’t that many true divas left on the planet, so Lopez, a U.S.-born Latina ever adept at shapeshifting for any position that calls for singing and dancing, might be the one individual to play Ingrid Luna proper about now. Ingrid is supposed to be an out-of-this-world-sized star, one who perhaps solely exists in our desires. Lopez is a kind of stars who hovers simply above the bottom, not often coming right down to Earth (even in “Hustlers,” her most embellished efficiency, she’s only a bit out of attain in that fur coat as a veteran stripper mentoring ingenues). That is smart for untouchable contract star Luna, however her casting solely underscores but once more the ordinariness of the development of the movie’s back-to-planet-Earth jail scenes. That’s a distinction Condon desires to conjure, but it surely solely leaves us dreaming of a greater display dream.
Grade: C+
“Kiss of the Spider Lady” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. It’s at present looking for U.S. distribution.
Need to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie critiques and demanding ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched publication, In Evaluate by David Ehrlich, wherein our Chief Movie Critic and Head Opinions Editor rounds up the most effective new critiques and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely out there to subscribers.