Metacritic reviews

Bill Condon sets himself a tough assignment trying to transform the tricky material into a great movie musical, but thanks in part to laudable work from his three leads, he occasionally comes close.

The musical finds rare shards of light — and an unlikely connection — in the most despairing of places.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is entertaining and invites us into its fantasy in a bid to forget reality for a while. And for the two hours I was watching, I did.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is yet another decent adaptation, but even Condon's visual panache and scale can’t quite elevate this story to greatness.

We’re in safest hands with Lopez and Condon when he’s playing in that sandbox as the cell-based scenes can be a little stagey and rushed in comparison.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

Kiss of the Spider Woman 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 identity. Yet there’s nothing revolutionary about the movie that contains them.

Dreamgirls director Bill Condon’s off-putting movie is a visual and narrative mess: polished where it should be gritty and ugly where it must be glamorous. Bland, almost always.

Here is an opportunity for a wild and sorrowful confluence of gay dream and national nightmare. Alas, this Kiss of the Spider Woman gives us a competent but glancing rendering of the easier, more palatable aspects of a story that should be anything but.

The effort is strenuous; all 128 minutes of it. But it’s almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.