14. Kiss of the Spider Woman, dir. Bill Condon
I guess I'm alone on this one?
Some of these movies are going to appear on nearly every Best of 2025 list. Do not be surprised when I cover Sinners, one of the most popular movies of the year. Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is going to make this list too. That one will likely win Best Foreign Language Picture and might be nominated for Best Picture, the juxtaposition of Brazilian fascist oppression and Hollywood blockbusters being an irresistible concoction for the Academy voters. But a very similar movie is not on a lot of Top 10 Lists. Kiss of the Spider Woman, a queer romance set in an Argentinian prison and a love letter to the golden age of musicals, will not win many awards. It got mixed reviews and nobody saw it. This movie made two million dollars against a budget of $30 million, because Lionsgate wrote it off as a failure. The only reason I knew Spider Woman existed at all was thanks to randomly checking the AMC App, which has become my only way to know about what's actually playing in theaters.
I didn't even know it was a remake of a 1985 movie, or an adaptation of a 1992 stage musical based on a 1974 novel by Manuel Puig. I saw that title and thought "huh, they made a sequel to Madame Web, I gotta see this!"
Bill Condon has the credentials to make a glamorous musical. His CV includes Dreamgirls and Chicago. He was also the director who did the best with the aching unsatisfiable romance at the center of the Twilight movies. Spider Woman is another collaboration with frequent cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, and it might be his best work. The structure of Spider Woman is about two prisoners, Valentin (Diego Luna) and Molina (Tonatiuh) stuck together in the bowls of one of the junta's worst black holes. Their cell is cramped and dark, so minimalist that it could be a stage set. Meanwhile, the two escape into the fantasy world of Molina's recounting of one of his favorite movies, the movie-within-a-movie Kiss of the Spider Woman. This is where the film explodes into dancing and movement and the bright dazzle of technicolor celluloid. At the center of their dreams is the actress Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a Hollywood starlet who is both the heroine and villain in a dual role. Duality is all over the place here since Molina and Valentin end up playing singing roles in their imagination. Reality is dismal and small, but the big screen can be enormous and free.
I'm always a sucker for fiction playing with its multiple levels of reality. Molina, who is a trans in a time when such things are not recognized properly, casts themselves in the movie as Luna's gay sidekick, magically replacing the mediocre actor in the original text. From there you can be increasingly unsure how much of what we're seeing is the "true" Spider Woman and how much is Molina's invention to help along Valentin in his struggles. Diego Luna is playing another Cassian Andor, a butch Marxist hero, who resents Hollywood musicals as unimportant capitalist nonsense. But eventually he's drawn into the glamor of it all. Luna/Valentin is cast as J-Lo's handsome leading man lover. We therefore have a queer romance that develops within the veneer of a Hollywood romance. They use the play of a straight male-female Hollywood movie to slide past the cultural taboo that separates them. It's a great dynamic.
It is an enormous shame that this version of Kiss of the Spider Woman is certainly doomed to be forgotten. I can only hope that Tonatiuh does not end up forgotten with it, I want to see more movies with them in it. Lopez and Luna are not quite perfect for Old Hollywood glamor, they're never quite comfortable doing this, but Tonatiuh belongs in celluloid.
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