While Hidden Figures hits many of the beats one would expect, Melfi’s film strikes a delicate balance of injecting levity within the character-based historical drama that propels the story forward.

Hidden Figures is feel-good history, but it works, and it works on behalf of heroes from a cinematically under-served community. These smart accomplished women had the right stuff, and so does this movie.

A paean to the unsung, Hidden Figures is also a romanticized tribute to everyday problem solvers who, in the movie’s eyes, are their own kind of superheroes.

Hidden Figures is empowerment cinema at its most populist, and one only wishes that the film had existed at the time it depicts — though ongoing racial tensions and gender double-standards suggest that perhaps we haven’t come such a long way, baby.

The fine, spirited work of Taraji P. Henson, Spencer and Janelle Monae as irresistible rooting interests, as well as Kevin Costner’s winningly lived-in turn as the head of Langley’s Space Task Group, deepen a film that’s propelled by sitcommy beats and expository dialogue.

The central characters' dogged refusal to cede their places on a team that keeps trying to reject them is a moving display of heroism.

Warm and witty performances by Spencer, Hensen and Monae, the stoic moral stature Costner plays and unlikable-until-they’re-reasonable turns by Dunst and Parsons make Hidden Figures a winner, a piece of unknown history rendered flesh and blood funny, uplifting and never less than entertaining.

Hidden Figures is an earnest movie, but not a very exciting one. The screenplay feels as engineered as a Gemini rocket launch, with every scene and line carefully calculated.

Everything in Hidden Figures is smoothly efficient but also a little anticlimactic and frictionless — the story’s happy ending a little too easily achieved.

At a time when calls for diverse media dominate the industry, Hidden Figures hedges its bets with a family-friendly commercial solution: warm and fuzzy storytelling that’s both progressive and safe.