I've now seen both Loving and Hidden Figures. I enjoyed the latter more, I think more highly of the first.
Why? Hidden Figures has Hollywood touches. More significantly, I lived through the space race and a number of things struck me as off, though in fairness I may simply be showing my ignorance. Loving on the other hand covers the same time period, but I claim less familiarity with the context. It seems realistic, as Manchester by the Sea is realistic, but Hidden Figures less so.
On the other hand, I find Hidden Figures to be more interesting. In some ways it's the other side of the coin from what seems to be the standard modern criticism of liberal government during the New Deal and later. When you combine government and new technology, there are chances for change I think are less present in business. Unfortunately, often the advances aren't sustained. I suspect the African-American women in NASA who changed from "computers" to "feeding" the IBM 7090 computer were not the tip of a significantly growing programming force.
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