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Jennifer Lopez Goes Full Musical in a New Kiss of the Spider Woman

By Jesse Hassenger  |  October 10, 2025 | 11:15am
Movies Reviews Bill Condon
Jennifer Lopez Goes Full Musical in a New Kiss of the Spider Woman
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Jennifer Lopez has long picked movie roles like a singer, rather than an actor. She’s excelled when her roles have sharper crime-drama edges, whether on the side of the law (The Cell), a little bit of malfeasance (Hustlers), or one dabbling in the other (her masterful, star-making work in Out of Sight). She’s perhaps less adept at the kind of ego-tripping vehicles (and frequent displays of false modesty) that a massive pop star might board after long, strategizing meetings that accomplish nothing. Recent examples of those nothings include Marry Me, Atlas, and Shotgun Wedding. Less recent examples include a troubling number of her movies from the past quarter-century.

In Kiss of the Spider Woman, a movie-musical adaptation of the Broadway musical adaptation of a novel (which was also previously adapted into a straight play and an Oscar-winning film), Lopez meets her talent halfway. This time, she has chosen a role like a singer who really wants an Oscar. It’s as if she saw Ariana DeBose win one at least in part for the expressiveness of her dancing in West Side Story and realized she had been going about this all wrong. That’s not to say she takes on the triple-duty title role with a naked zeal for her future acceptance speeches. It’s just that Ingrid Luna, an old-timey actress who has a double role in a fictional film also called Kiss of the Spider Woman, is perfectly calibrated to showcase Lopez’s dancing and singing with both clarity and (given her pop-star career) range. The role, in fact, is almost entirely song and dance.

It’s also not exactly “real” in the world of the movie. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a fantasia described by Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a citizen of 1980s Argentina who has been jailed for public indecency. His cellmate is political prisoner Valentin Arregu (Diego Luna), who disdains Luis’s supposedly apolitical stance and his attempts to make conversation. But Luis persists, and eventually the two men grow to like each other. That affection grows out of Valentin’s growing and surprising interest as Luis explain the bizarre plot of his favorite movie, which he admits is not a traditionally admired classic. Instead, it’s something stranger, a hybrid of musical, melodrama, and monster-movie fantasy that, he understands, doesn’t quite fit, and is maybe more interesting for its imperfections.

True to his word, it’s hard to pinpoint what the hell the fictional Spider Woman is supposed to be from the scenes depicted here, which form the real film’s musical spine, and much of its flesh, too. The stage version has some musical numbers that take place in the real world, in addition to Luis and Valentin’s shared movie fantasy. The new film mostly jettisons the real-world songs, though director Bill Condon apparently doesn’t mind retaining the extremely theatrical (and, more specifically, extremely Broadway) introduction to the “real” characters. You can practically hear the theater boards creak beneath the actors’ feet as they trade shorthanded, quippy exposition in their first few scenes together, real ham-handed here-I-am-and-this-is-my-character stuff.

When Condon does cut to the film of Spider Woman for big production numbers, also featuring Tonatiuh and Luna alongside Lopez, the cinematography shifts to imitate what vaguely resembles a Technicolor musical of the post-widescreen 1950s, though the movie’s modest budget presumably precludes the celluloid shooting that would make the bright colors look less digital and Instagrammy. Even allowing for those limitations, the sample movie is a bizarre spectacle, and not quite in the way that Dancer in the Dark hybridized lushness with harsh digital video. One duet in a darkroom pays direct homage to the 1957 Fred Astaire/Audrey Hepburn musical Funny Face, while the later romantic melodrama skews more Sirk Lite. Meanwhile, Lopez’s Spider Woman – a guardian of a village who requires a kiss that will kill its recipient as payment for her services – herself feels like a concept out of a 1940s jungle-monster movie.

Figuring out this movie-within-a-movie through the bits and pieces depicted here, puzzling over whether its references to mismatched genres is intentional or just clumsy, and further wondering whether we are meant to be seeing accurate excerpts from the film or Luis’s erratic recollection of it filtered through his current experiences and inner conflicts … it’s all part of the movie’s fun, albeit a wobbly form of it. Bill Condon has done so many movie musicals, yet he never quite knocks it out of the park. His work isn’t as frustratingly slapdash as his fellow go-to musical directors Rob Marshall or Adam Shankman, but there’s always some visible strain, even in the musical numbers that pop. For example: Why, after Luis describes a movie bathed in rich red and gold scenery, do we first see scenes from Kiss of the Spider Woman coordinated in blue and cream tones? After years of practice, Condon still sometimes appears caught flat-footed by his own material.

The actors are on stronger ground. Lopez doesn’t exactly bring depth to her role(s), which feels like an unburdening; for the first time in ages, her super-entertainer showiness has a sweet-natured purity. Like many of cinema’s better dancing-forward performances, she looks like she’s having a blast. Though Tonatiuh looks a little shticky next to Luna, who has already played a principled revolutionary in a Star Wars TV series of all things, they convey mutual affection over a short period, for a relationship that develops somewhat differently than in previous adaptations, both in terms of plot and sexuality. The movie seems aware that by contemporary definitions that didn’t exist in the film’s time period, or even at the time of the original 1993 production, Luis registers as a trans woman. That gives the drama an extra charge, as does the minimal work the movie needs to locate contemporary parallels in fascist persecution. (It may not have been work at all, considering this movie was shot before the 2024 election.) This latest Kiss of the Spider Woman is nearly as ramshackle as its fictional namesake; it’s not the powerhouse it should be. But it comes together. And for Lopez, its artifice looks more like a form of honesty.

Director: Bill Condon
Writer: Bill Condon
Starring: Tonatiuh, Diego Luna, Jennifer Lopez, Bruno Bichir
Release Date: October 10, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

 
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