The part of Luis Molina, the gay prisoner with a penchant for Hollywood’s Golden Age at the heart of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” has been good to actors over the years. It’s what got William Hurt his first best actor Oscar, for Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film adaptation. Several years later, Brent Carver would win a Tony for John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Broadway musical.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the standout in Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (in theaters Friday) is the person playing Molina. Still, it takes a special kind of actor to make such an immediate impact as Tonatiuh, a relative newcomer, does in this film. They don’t even need all the window dressing of the fantasy movie musical sequences to make their scenes come alive.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” has h

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