Craig Seligman

“Man of Steel” is an hour of back story, an hour of explosions and crashing skyscrapers and then a half-hour-long fistfight. I counted two jokes.

“Dirty Wars” bristles at the extralegal, ever-expanding war on terror.

Nothing is forced in Joss Whedon’s modern-dress, black-and-white version of “Much Ado About Nothing.” He filmed it in the kind of Southern California mansion that a modern prince might live in. (It’s his own house.)

Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” confines itself to the period in the early 1960s, when the German-born thinker covered the trial of Nazi chief Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker magazine and weathered the firestorm that followed.

Scattered among the profiles that make up most of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America” are nine collage-poems in which the author, George Packer, tries to capture the cacophony of American voices from a given year.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney untangles the complex Wikileaks saga and founder Julian Assange’s brilliant, dark mind in the fascinating “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.”

Ifemelu and her boyfriend, Obinze, are middle-class Nigerians, hardly “starving, or raped, or from burned villages” but still “mired in dissatisfaction.” They consider Lagos a backwater and they want out.

J.J. Abrams’s “Star Trek Into Darkness” is so much better than it needs to be you just might regret decades of smirking at Trekkie convention-going geeks.

Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is a gaudy, Ritz-sized rhinestone of a movie, more flashy than dazzling, beguiling from some angles and phony to its core.

“A smirk and a cheesy one-liner?,” sneers a villainess during some finely choreographed mayhem in Shane Black’s “Iron Man 3.”

Many of the films shown at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, which concluded Sunday, will be opening in coming weeks on local screens. These were among the best (or in some cases, just the buzziest):

The hard-luck stories in Barbara Garson’s “Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession” fall into two sections: people who have lost their jobs and people who have lost their homes.