Ben Affleck wears a Shinola Runwell

In a bright corporate conference room, Christian Wolff stands at the end of a long table with his shirtsleeves rolled past the elbow, and behind him a whiteboard runs wall to wall, ruled into columns headed NET INCOME, SALES REVENUES, and CGS, with the years 2000 through 2014 stacked down the left side. Ben Affleck plays Wolff in The Accountant as an autistic forensic accountant, a man who un-cooks the books of criminal syndicates from a small office in Plainfield, Illinois. Here the client is a robotics company. By the time he is finished with its fifteen years of figures, he has traced sixty-one million dollars in embezzlement.

On his left wrist is a Shinola Runwell. It is a plain steel watch, forty-one millimeters across, with a black dial, white block numerals, and a small running-seconds register tucked at six o'clock. The movement is quartz, a caliber Shinola calls Argonite, assembled in its Detroit factory from imported Swiss parts. New, the watch costs a few hundred dollars.

It is a modest watch for a man who launders fortunes. He keeps the valuables he has taken as payment over the years, an original Jackson Pollock among them, hidden in an Airstream trailer, and wears the cheap Shinola where anyone can see it.