Latina women fighting dictatorship are having a moment. In Sundance’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jennifer Lopez serves as a symbol of resistance for characters caught in Argentina’s Dirty War. While in TIFF standout Noviembre, Natalia Reyes plays a paramilitary member who’s literally fighting the oppressive government of 1980s Colombia. Together, these 2025 festival darlings remind us how trauma, gender, and power intersect, giving us hope in waging our own battles.

Directed by Dreamgirls’ Bill Condon as an adaptation of the 1990s musical (based on Argentine Manuel Puig’s 1970s novel), Kiss of the Spider Woman is a fictionalized story of two men imprisoned during Argentina’s military dictatorship. In the 2025 film, Jennifer Lopez plays the title character, Diego Luna plays political prisoner Valentin, and Tonatiuh, the persecuted gay man Molina. To escape their confinement – if only in their dreams – Molina narrates the plots of his favorite films, particularly that of JLo’s Spider Woman, who we see in a film-within-the-film.

The Spider Woman is a critical escape for Argentina’s oppressed class – she represents artistic exorcism and poetic inspiration, providing the strength Molina and eventually Valentin need to face their problems.

The new Kiss of the Spider Woman is a decent movie, with a determined performance by Lopez showing off that she’s still an amazing dancer with all the right moves. But the movie is kept from greatness by an adaptation choice: Instead of Molina telling a variety of stories with different but related themes, in this version, he tells us just one. Maybe this reduction gives some continuity, but the cost is too high, erasing the common and important thread that tied the stories in the original together – that of a tragic, misunderstood, but ultimately persevering woman (sometimes,yes, with animal-like characteristics).

By eliminating that narrative thread, the new adaptation feels unnecessarily cut short. Still, it’s worth watching for its fascinating exploration of the role a complex and determined woman can play in surviving oppression.

Awaiting distribution after premiering at Toronto, Noviembre also follows a woman in a violent, LATAM setting. Specifically, the TIFF film is about the 1985 storming of the Palace of Justice by paramilitary groups in Colombia and the horrific bloodshed that resulted. Natalia Reyes (who starred in Terminator Dark Fate and also Colombia’s beautiful Birds of Passage) plays the main character, a revolutionary named Clara Helena. She and her group take the Palace, keeping a group of civilians as well as the country’s Supreme Court Justices hostage.

Noviembre includes a ton of archival footage, weaving its fictionalized telling of the events inside the Palace with very real footage of things as they happened on the outside.

At the heart of it all is Reyes’ strong but sensible Clara, a woman trying to get a grip on the spiraling violence around her while advancing her revolutionary cause. Reyes plays the part to perfection, conveying the despair, fragility, and conviction of the lost-cause fighters of the time.

So what do these two characters have in common? Well, they’re both women resisting dictatorship with the tools they have on hand. The Spider Woman does it with kisses, Clara with bullets. Each in their own way reminds us that a person’s own struggles tend to live within broader social upheavals— a timely topic if there ever was one.

Also, both films feature female characters embodying resilience, whether through the imaginative escape of Spider Woman or Clara Helena’s raw determination. And, despite their vastly different circumstances and methods, both women must navigate gender expectations, personal and political trauma, and the power dynamics of their days to pursue their aims.

So these films have almost everything in common when you look past the surface. They invite viewers to consider the transformative potential of women who, faced with huge adversity, choose agency over submission and become symbols of both hope and tragedy. Their stories are about how female figures – whether mythic or grounded in reality – can challenge both the systems that oppress them and the narratives that define heroism.

Theirs is the inherent beauty of film, and why I recommend watching Kiss of the Spider Woman and Noviembre as soon as you can.