Get the latest gossip
One Star-Making Performance Can’t Save Kiss of the Spider Woman
Energetic and riveting, Tonatiuh brings layers of tenderness and complexity. If only the rest of the picture could match his vitality.
Molina, a gay hairdresser convicted of public indecency during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, has been sent to the political wing of a prison and put in the same cell as Valentin Arregui (a solid, if unremarkable Diego Luna), an intense and serious-minded Marxist revolutionary. The growing bond of the two cellmates is charted by Molina’s recounting of a fictional 1950s Hollywood musical set in South America called Kiss of the Spider Woman, featuring Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a Dolores del Río–type star. Watching the young actor as Molina (and as Kendall Nesbitt, a dashingly macho but secretly closeted magazine assistant in the fake movie), we connect intuitively with the sense of entrapment, as well as the need to carve out small corners of beauty in an otherwise heartless and murderous world.
Or read this on VULTURE