Kiss of the Spider Woman

Don't be too quick to jump on Hurt with complaints of old-fashioned gay stereotyping. Only with a development well into the movie will the audience realize the layers he brought to Molina's role-playing.

Tells one of those rare and entrancing stories where one thing seems to happen while another thing is really happening.

Each man winds up owing the other -- and the enormity of the sacrifices they make on one another's behalf are quite moving and have not been duplicated in the movies since.

Some will find him (Hurt) mesmerizing, others artificially lowkeyed.

It packs an emotional punch despite shortcomings of story and style.

Appears strangely dated, and its unspecified location seems existentially hokey.

The film's theme of acceptance is undercut considerably by Hurt's overcalculated performance.

"Kiss of the Spider Woman" is one of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film. Héctor Babenco explores a hypnotic and mysterious film that still holds up.

A good sleep stimulant. A film that should have impacted me far more than it actually did. I ended up falling asleep while watching it. Not because of physical exhaustion, but because the first hour felt painfully slow, endless, and emotionally distant. That opening stretch has a rhythm that simply doesn’t work for me. Even though I find the characters interesting — conceptually speaking — I never truly connect with what the film is trying to convey. As someone who is deeply passionate about cinema, that “film within a film” structure should have been a weakness of mine, but instead it alienates me. I kept checking the clock several times before even reaching the forty-minute mark. The second half improves the overall experience somewhat. Here, I finally find moments that hold my attention, interest me, and keep me awake both literally and narratively. But the problem is that by the time the film reaches that point, I’m already completely detached from it. That affects the rest of the experience. The stronger second half doesn’t make up for the exhaustion caused by the first. Its political and romantic discourse is what ultimately makes my mind wander. It’s not that I don’t understand what the film is trying to say — it’s that it doesn’t affect me enough. And for a film that relies so heavily on its themes and message, that becomes the central issue. The characters also don’t feel human to me so much as they feel like tools of the screenplay. Molina, for example, played by William Hurt, interests me because of the way he escapes reality through cinema — something I can personally relate to. But when I think about him, the first thing that comes to mind is the idea he represents, not the person himself within the story. The same happens with Valentín, played by Raúl Juliá, who essentially embodies the political discourse and ideological struggle. I understand his situation, his conflict, and the backdrop of political repression, but the film never manages to make me truly feel it in the way it intends to. It talks about politics, revolution, injustice… but it reaches me in a more theoretical than emotional way. I don’t perceive them as deeply complex human beings, but rather as two opposing forces: love and politics. That symbolic reading is interesting, but it also makes everything feel more conceptual than lived-in. In the final half hour, I also start losing track of the narrative thread. Not because I’m completely disconnected, but because the structure no longer feels entirely clear to me. I understand, in broad terms, what the film is trying to say, but I can’t precisely follow the development of everything that happens. I can sense what the symbolism represents here, but I never fully grasp it, nor do I particularly care to. It feels like just another layer of meaning — one I think I understand — but not one that truly pulls me in or leaves me reflecting afterward. The best aspect of the film is the performances, especially Hurt’s, but its political discourse and thematic ambitions simply don’t interest me enough to emotionally affect me.