Sometimes a film can transcend its formulaic confines. That's triumphantly the case with Hidden Figures, a largely prosaically told reworking of the outsider-versus-the-system paradigm that gains piquancy from the story it has to tell and the vibrant personages at its centre. The chronicle of three black female mathematicians who against all sorts of odds transformed America's space movement in the early 1960s for keeps, Theodore Melfi's slice of a forgotten swath of history might have "Oscar upset" written across it – if La La Land at this point didn't look like such a lock.
That the film has also soared at the box office is heartening news in itself: a reminder that largescale audiences do exist for a portrait of a time when black lives didn't particularly matter, as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Johnson each discovered in different ways. First encountered on a Virginia road where the three women are tending to a broken-down car only to be approached by a white police officer who brings with him the whiff of fear, Melfi alongside Allison Schroeder's screenplay make implicit the irony of a country devoted to the pursuit of findings in space when so much needs doing here on planet earth. (The movie is based on Margot Lee Shetterly's bestseller of the same title.)
Not that our fearless and feisty trio are going to let colour barriers and prejudice – not to mention ages-old misogyny – stand in their way. Glimpsed at the start as a six-year-old whiz with numbers whose prowess simply will not be contained, Katherine (Taraji P Henson) is re-encountered as an adult handpicked to join what had been a men's-only flight research team. She immediately faces challenges that range from making coffee from a "colored" pot to sprinting to hell and back in order to find a toilet she can use. Her loo breaks are played for physical comedy shot through inevitably with pathos at the absurd injustice of it all, and the wonderful Henson does both parts of that equation proud, Pharrell Williams's aptly titled "Runnin'" providing a musical cue. 
While Katherine makes herself increasingly crucial to an initially hostile set of colleagues – the shining exception being her gum-chewing boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner on fine form, pictured above to the left of Henson) – Dorothy (Octavia Spencer, the lone Oscar nominee of the three women) awaits promotion to the rank of supervisor of a room of adroit black mathematicians who must not be left to languish. Her white superior is played by a tight-lipped Kirsten Dunst, who is the equivalent in Dorothy's worklife of the sneering Jim Parsons, one of Harrison's stable and a colleague who all but hisses steam every time Katherine enters his midst. That leaves Mary (the radiant Jonelle Monáe, concurrently also on view in Moonlight), whose own advancement as NASA's first female black engineer depends upon her being able to attend a local, whites-only school. Exuding a whiplash authority with every glance, Monáe projects Mary's intelligence informed at every turn by street smarts.
The women's domestic lives get a look-in now and again, with Moonlight Oscar hopeful Mahershala Ali invaluably on hand as the military man who is there in body and soul for the brainiac that is Katherine. But it's the life of the mind that exists to be celebrated here, as the women ascend in varying ways into career-related orbit, catching the attention of no less a figure than John Glenn (Glen Powell, playing a part amplified in resonance by Glenn's death the same month as the film's American release).
One might wish, I suppose, for filmmaking that itself possessed something of the take-no-prisoners savvy and wit embodied by our triptych of heroines: Melfi's direction takes the expected, conventional route towards uplift, when one wonders what a Barry Jenkins, say, might have made of the same material. On the other hand, I can't imagine not feeling a lump in the throat, not least when the final credits reveal actual images of the women themselves (Johnson is nearing 100), via the same sort of pictorial epilogue on view at Lion and here entirely appropriate to this tribute to three great ladies and how they found it within themselves to roar.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Hidden Figures
It’s not only physical slightness that sets Chiron apart: he’s treated as an outsider by his more aggressive contemporaries for another reason, one which they sense but he himself has not yet registered. The film opens with the latest of what we guess is a series of rejections, but this one ends on a more positive note with Little befriended by Juan (Mahershala Ali). Of Cuban descent, Juan may be a community hard man and drug dealer, but he shows only kindness to this resolutely silent youngster, first feeding him and then taking him home to his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe).
The defining moment of the succeeding section also takes place at the sea, as Chiron and Kevin talk on the beach (pictured above, Jharrel Jerome, left, with Ashton Sanders): Chiron once more risks trust, relaxing the barriers of self-protection that he has constructed around himself (“I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops”, he poignantly reveals). The cruelty is that hurt will again follow revelation, culminating in an act of self-assertion that will change the course of the young man’s life, sending him away from his home environment.
There are intriguing, contrasting perspectives on love here – and on the consequences when it breaks down. But Har’el seems reluctant to trust her subjects’ stories much, or even to tell them in a particularly clear or straightforward way. Instead, she seems to want to get inside her protagonists’ heads, to see the world from their individual perspectives – which might not give us many insights into love, even if it makes for some unforgettable visuals.
Har’el’s blurring of fact and fiction, though not a new trick, is one of the film’s most fascinating conceits – and also one of its most troublesome. It’s fine when we know what we’re watching isn’t real – as in Willie’s elaborately choreographed underwater skirmish with (supposedly) his love rival (pictured above), which his story builds to. But at other times, truth and fictions are considerably less easy to tell apart – as in New Yorker John’s strange appearance on a cable TV channel, expounding his theories on love.
But for all the visual cleverness, the garish colours and the dreamlike connections, the stories Har’el is telling just don’t end up seeming that interesting – or at least she doesn’t probe them strongly enough to discover much empathy. By the end of LoveTrue, we don’t get to know (and therefore care) much about any of her trio of protagonists – are they there simply because they’re a bit kooky? In any case, Har’el doesn’t seem compelled enough by them to tell their stories simply and sincerely, other than as a framework for her own unbridled imagination. LoveTrue is a thoroughly entertaining and stylish 80 minutes of cinema, but whether it shines any new light on one of life’s great mysteries – well, that’s another matter entirely.
Living in Hell’s Kitchen in the late Eighties, I collected my own set of memories: a waif-like teen prostitute flagging down trucks outside my apartment house on 46th Street each lunchtime for weeks on end; spent condoms in the gutters; being stalked by the six-foot hustler I rebuffed on 42nd the only time I walked down the street at 1am. Hundreds of mentally ill and homeless people lived locally. It wasn’t simply a red-light district; it was a well of illness and pain.
Taxi Driver’s undiminished power owes partially to Scorsese’s harnessing of Michael Johnson’s restless camerawork, with its ominous pans and tracking shots, and 
In 1981, Travis inspired John Hinckley Jr, who wanted to impress Foster, to try to assassinate President Reagan. Taxi Driver thus acquired an undeserved notoriety. Blaming the film as the root cause of Hinckley’s act is akin to blaming it for Arthur Bremer’s 1972 shooting of George Wallace (Schrader read Bremer’s diaries before writing the script) or for Samuel Byck’s assassination attempt on President Nixon in 1974 (Schrader says he based “Bickle” on a radio show called The Bickersons, not “Byck”), which generated the 2004 Sean Penn film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
