Kiss of the Spider Woman

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a bold screen musical written and directed by Bill Condon, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Chicago and director of Dreamgirls. It adapts the 1992 Broadway musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, itself drawn from Manuel Puig's 1976 novel, and premiered to acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival before a theatrical release from Roadside Attractions and Lionsgate.

Set in an Argentine prison during the 'Dirty War' of the early 1980s, the film confines two very different men to the same cell: Valentin (Diego Luna), a hardened Marxist political prisoner, and Molina (Tonatiuh), a gentle gay window-dresser jailed on morality charges. To escape their grim reality, Molina recounts, scene by scene, a glittering Hollywood musical starring his idol, played in dazzling fantasy sequences by Jennifer Lopez as both the screen diva Ingrid and the mythic Spider Woman. As the two prisoners' bond deepens, the film moves between the drab cell and Molina's Technicolor daydreams.

Lopez drew some of the strongest reviews of her career and genuine awards buzz for her musical numbers, and critics admired Condon's audacious shifts between stark realism and old-Hollywood spectacle. Commercially, however, the film struggled badly in theaters, becoming one of the year's most talked-about box-office disappointments despite its warm critical reception, a fate that made its streaming arrival a second chance to find its audience. It streams on Hulu.