Director: Theodore Melfi
Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kevin Costner
Given the opportunity, people can do extraordinary things. How unfortunate then that opportunities are so limited to the few, rather than open to the many. Hidden Figures, based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, is the story of three women - Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson - who broke barriers of color and gender to help send a man into space and it's as rousing and as crowd pleasing as its box office success would suggest. As biographical/historical movies go, it hits that sweet spot between being important and being highly entertaining, and manages at once to be very direct about its primary theme (racism), while still being subtle in the distinctions it draws between the different forms that racism can take, as well as the different means through which it can be combated. While certainly not the most technically sophisticated movie I saw from 2016, Hidden Figures is nevertheless one for the ages.
