Full coverage: ‘Hidden Figures’

A trailer for “Hidden Figures,” starring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer.

Like the calculating women whose lives it celebrates, “Hidden Figures” knows what it’s doing.

Allison Schroeder was on the playground in 1986, chasing a friend around the slide, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

Nominations for the 89th Academy Awards will be announced early Tuesday morning, and while there’s no such thing as a sure thing, Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” is probably going to have a very good day.

When NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson asks to join a high-level briefing in the run-up to astronaut John Glenn’s historic 1962 flight in the film “Hidden Figures,” an engineer rushes to shut the idea down.

Octavia Spencer thought she might try to become as mechanically minded as her “Hidden Figures” character.

Octavia Spencer likes to research her roles, but there wasn’t much on file about her “Hidden Figures” character, Dorothy Vaughan.

Before they were machines based on silicon, “computers” were actually women — though their colleagues would often refer to them as “girls.”