It’s been a good year to be a Kiss of the Spider Woman collector. Criterion brought Héctor Babenco’s 1985 drama to 4K in January, and five months later Kino Lorber followed with Bill Condon’s 2025 musical adaptation. Condon’s version opened theatrically in October 2025 and hit digital a month later, so this marks its first physical-media release. Revisiting it at home didn’t change much from my original theatrical review: two knockout performances are still fighting against a movie that never completely figures out how to connect its two halves.

The story is set in 1983, during the final days of Argentina’s military dictatorship. Political prisoner Valentín (Diego Luna, Elysium) shares a cell with Molina (Tonatiuh, Carry-On), a gay window dresser who survives their confinement by disappearing into the movies in his head. His favorite is an old Hollywood musical starring screen goddess Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers), and every time Molina resumes the story, Condon, borrowing a page from his adaptation of Chicago, trades prison concrete for chrome, sequins and fantasy.

Lopez has been waiting a long time for a role like this, and she goes after it with everything she has. The dancing is sharp, the glamour fits her perfectly and she gives the songs enough emotional muscle to keep Ingrid from becoming only an icon in fabulous costumes. “Where You Are” is worth the rental on its own. It’s the kind of number that makes you wish the entire movie could maintain that same voltage.

Tonatiuh may be even better. Molina could easily become a bundle of mannerisms, but Tonatiuh never lets that happen. The flamboyance is part of the character’s armor, not the punchline, and the loneliness underneath it gradually becomes harder to hide. Luna is shakier in the musical material, especially early on, but he gets stronger once the movie settles into the quieter relationship between Valentín and Molina. As was the case in Babenco’s film, their slow thaw is the real heart of the film.

Condon, who directed the live-action Beauty and the Beast, makes the divide between those worlds obvious. Prison scenes are cramped, gray and handheld. Molina’s fantasies open everything up with old-school studio lighting, elaborate choreography and Colleen Atwood costumes that practically announce their own entrances. Individually, both approaches work. The trouble is the distance between them.

Condon drops much of the material sung inside the cell in the stage version and keeps most of the musical numbers inside Molina’s fantasy world. That gives the movie a very clean visual concept, but it also keeps slamming on the brakes. The prison scenes become straight drama, the musical arrives, the movie lifts off, then we go back behind bars and the energy drops with it. The stage show’s constant back-and-forth between reality and imagination gets flattened into two modes that don’t always feed each other.

That’s frustrating because the idea underneath it all still works beautifully. Molina’s imagination is one thing the regime can’t confiscate. Movies become memory, fantasy, escape and eventually a language through which these two very different people learn how to understand one another. Condon dedicates the film to Fred Ebb, Terrence McNally and Chita Rivera, Broadway’s original Spider Woman, and that affection is all over the screen.

The film may be uneven, but its belief in the movies as a lifeline is hard to resist. Molina survives by turning a prison cell into a movie palace, and for a few numbers, Condon manages the same trick.