In “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a young man named Molina explains to his cellmate, Valentín, why he worships the fictional Golden Age movie star Ingrid Luna, whom everyone affectionately refers to as La Luna.
“No matter how hard Hollywood tried to make her seem all-American,” he says, with adoration in his voice, “she never stopped being Latin.”
That single line from the film, opening in theaters on Oct. 10, crystallizes the perfect casting of La Luna: She’s played by Jennifer Lopez, the all-American Bronx girl, born to Puerto Rican parents, who has always defied conventional wisdom about what she could accomplish in a screen career. At every turn, she’s been boldly, unashamedly herself.
Lopez has starred in her fair share (maybe more) of bad movies. But her screen appearances are always just one part of the grander art of Being Jennifer Lopez. What you see onscreen, what you hear on the radio, what you see in the store, what you read in the headlines and what you hear about her life offscreen — whether or not it’s the whole story — are all inextricable, each one informing the other. And that’s been true from the start.
‘Selena’ (1997)
The Budding Star
Lopez started her career as a dancer — she broke through as one of the Fly Girls on “In Living Color” in 1991 — and landed a handful of small screen parts in her 20s. But her breakout came in 1997, after she was cast to play one of the most influential Latin artists of all time, the Mexican American singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, whose popularity on both sides of the border catapulted Tejano music into the spotlight before she was murdered at the age of 23. The movie is uneven in places, but Lopez’s performance combines a sweet innocence with unmistakable magnetism: This woman is a star, a detonation, a force to watch.
“Selena” now feels as if it’s a blueprint for Lopez’s career. During filming, Lopez decided to embark on a music career, leading to her debut album, “On the 6,” in 1999. Like Selena, Lopez would go on to record hit songs in both Spanish and English. And like Selena, who created a clothing line and opened fashion boutiques, Lopez would start a number of self-branded business ventures, beginning with a clothing line.
And she’d overcome considerable odds in a film industry obsessed with waifish white women. The director Gregory Nava later said that when he asked Warner Bros. to pay for an Oscar campaign, he was told the academy would “never nominate a Latina.”
(Available to buy or rent on major platforms.)
Out of Sight (1998)
The Actress With Depth
Lopez worked constantly through the late 1990s into the mid-2000s, making movies in all kinds of genres at a hectic pace. Her best performance in this era came early: Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” in which Lopez plays a jaded U.S. marshal who ends up, somewhat accidentally, sharing the trunk of a car with an inveterate bank robber, played by George Clooney, dripping with charm. If their relationship is adversarial, it’s because their chemistry threatens to incinerate the screen.
You get a glimpse of Lopez’s true acting capabilities, which few movies really give her a chance to demonstrate. She’s funny. She’s tough. She’s well-matched with the guy who thinks he’s one step ahead of everyone. Some people disappear into a role, but Clooney never has, and Lopez doesn’t, either — you know you’re watching a star, every second.
(Available to buy or rent on major platforms.)
Gigli (2003)
The Tabloid Fixture
“Gigli” is the most infamous entry in Lopez’s oeuvre. It’s a mess, recut and reworked by the studio (the director Martin Brest later called it a “ghastly cadaver”), often named among the worst movies of all time, though it’s not quite as bad as you might have heard. It was also a very expensive box-office bomb, all the more notable because Lopez by then was a chart-topping singer. And it’s the movie on which Lopez and her co-star Ben Affleck fell in love — the first time — leading to an 18-month tabloid-fodder romance.
Lopez is actually delightful in the film, even if her character is ridiculous, sprung from a ludicrous male fantasy and made to deliver absurd lines. But the “Gigli” debacle best illustrates how Lopez’s offscreen life and onscreen performances often inform one another. Nobody watches “Gigli” anymore, but if you’ve heard of it, you know it’s somehow related to Bennifer.
(Available to buy or rent on major platforms.)
Shall We Dance? (2004)
The Dancer With Chops
The foundation of Lopez’s career is dancing, and though it’s never been the singular focus of her work, occasionally she seems to take a role just to remind us that she can really tear it up on the dance floor. In “Shall We Dance?,” she plays Paulina, a ballroom instructor who inspires a jaded businessman (Richard Gere) to take up the art, and who in turn decides to take up competitive dancing again. The press tour gave her ample opportunity to talk about dancing, and while she claimed ballroom was like a foreign language to her, you just watch her in the film and know that, in some sense, she’s speaking her native tongue.
(Available to buy or rent on major platforms.)
Maid in Manhattan (2002)
The Neighborhood Success Story
“Maid in Manhattan,” probably Lopez’s most-loved rom-com, perfectly nails a particular class-consciousness she’s played with in a number of roles. Lopez is Marisa Ventura, a housekeeper at a high-end Manhattan hotel who accidentally ends up dating Christopher Marshall (Ralph Fiennes), the wealthy scion of a political dynasty. It’s a 21st-century Cinderella story. Eventually, Marisa reveals that she’s always lived within four blocks of the Bronx apartment where she grew up. In Chris’s world, she’s a fish out of water. But she’s adaptable. She knows how to hustle.
It’s no accident that the movie was released a few months after Lopez’s single “Jenny From the Block,” whose lyrics insist that her newfound fame and wealth — remember, “Selena” was only five years earlier — haven’t left her out of touch with her roots. This subtext has cropped up elsewhere, like her 2018 film “Second Act.” (Bonus subtext: Ralph Fiennes is distantly related to various nobility.)
(Stream on Amazon Prime; buy or rent on major platforms.)
Hustlers (2019)
The Tough-as-Nails Veteran
It would be ridiculous to say that Lopez disappeared from the public eye in the 2010s. She released albums, made films, judged on “American Idol,” played a three-year residency in Las Vegas and a whole lot more. But when she starred in Lorene Scafaria’s “Hustlers” as Ramona, a stripper who mentors a younger woman at a high-end club, her performance — especially her incredible physical strength at age 50 — felt like a revelation. She seemed more mature, with a regal confidence befitting a woman who had been through a lot, knew who she was and was not going to get knocked around anymore. It wasn’t hard to read Lopez’s history through Ramona, especially since she’s often chosen characters who have had to claw their way to security.
(Available to buy or rent on major platforms.)
This is Me … Now: A Love Story (2024)
The Hollywood Diva
In her 2022 romantic comedy “Marry Me,” Lopez plays a pop superstar who’s unlucky in love and remarks to a friend, “Why do I always pick the wrong guy? I let everyone down. I can’t get out of my own way.” That’s a running thread in a number of her films, and in “This Is Me … Now,” one of her most recent screen projects, she made the subtext text. It’s not exactly a film, more of a narrative-driven, album-length music movie in which Lopez plays a thrice-married “romance addict” who yearns for love but looks in all the wrong places, a character she readily compared herself to in interviews. She sings and dances in an alternate version of her own life. It’s spectacular, intimate and sometimes a little bizarre.
And of course, there’s an offscreen back story. Lopez and Affleck had renewed their romance during the pandemic; they married in 2022, but “This Is Me … Now” came amid rumors of relationship troubles. The project, which included an album and the announcement of a North American tour, was released to bafflement and derision, and the tour was canceled; in January 2025, the couple’s divorce was finalized.
Lopez’s art has often imitated life, and her life has imitated art. In “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” her Hollywood diva ascends to the pantheon on her own spectacular terms. A hint of what’s next? If history’s any indication, we’ll definitely find out.
(Stream on Amazon Prime.)
Videos: Warner Bros. (“Selena,”) Universal Pictures (“Out of Sight,”) Columbia/Revolution Studios (“Gigli” and “Maid in Manhattan,”) Miramax (“Shall We Dance?”) Gloria Sanchez Productions (“Hustlers,”) Amazon/MGM Studios (“This Is Me… Now: A Love Story.”)
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
The post 7 Roles That Explain Why Jennifer Lopez’s Life Is Her Greatest Art appeared first on New York Times.
