Adrien Brody wears an unidentified watch

The watch is gold-cased with a light dial on a black leather strap, and nobody is wearing it. In Hollywoodland (2006), it shows up as evidence — an inscribed wristwatch pulled from the belongings of George Reeves, television's Superman, found dead from a gunshot in his bedroom in 1959. Adrien Brody plays Louis Simo, the private detective hired to look into a death that was ruled suicide but never stopped looking like something else.

Allen Coulter directed, with Ben Affleck as Reeves and Diane Lane as Toni Mannix, wife of an MGM executive and Reeves's lover. Brody's Simo is a low-rent PI who stumbles into a case bigger than he expected, and the inscribed watch is the kind of detail he turns over in his hands trying to figure out what it connects to. The brand has not been identified. In a film about a death nobody can agree on, even a dead man's watch tells a different story depending on who reads the inscription.