"There are a number of overt references to the past in “Man of Steel,” a title that itself summons up America’s lost industrial history. There’s even a scene in which Jor-El narrates Krypton’s rise and calamitous fall using immersive, metallic-gray images that morph and scroll across the frame like an animated version of a W.P.A. bas-relief mural. For roughly 100 minutes, or the running time of an average movie, Mr. Snyder is in control of his material. His handling of the story’s many flashbacks, which fill in piecemeal Superman’s Kansas childhood as Clark, is fluid and apt. Each return to the past becomes another tile in the mosaic, adding to the emerging portrait of the adult wanderer and seeker he has become. His adoptive parents, Martha (Diane Lane) and Jonathan (Kevin Costner), come into focus, as does the bewildered child (played by Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry), who doesn’t understand why he’s so different. Mr. Snyder borrows too many canted camera angles and too much sun-kissed fluttering laundry from Terrence Malick, but the Kansas scenes solidify the human foundation of a divided identity."