Ryan Gosling wears an IWC Portugieser

Anthony Hopkins shoots his wife in the face, confesses to the police, and then proceeds to dismantle the prosecution's entire case. Gregory Hoblit's Fracture (2007) pairs Hopkins' meticulous engineer Ted Crawford against Ryan Gosling's ambitious young prosecutor William Beachum, and the fun of the film is watching the older man stay several moves ahead. Beachum takes the case because it looks easy, an open-and-shut confession. He's already accepted a job at a prestigious private firm and treats the trial as a formality.

Gosling wears an IWC Portugieser Chronograph, and the camera finds it on a beat of fatigue: alone in a dim office, Beachum presses the heel of his hand into his eye, and the gesture lifts the wrist so the white dial sits dead center in the frame. You can read the watch clearly there, an Arabic-numeral dial with slim leaf hands, a railway-track minute ring, and twin sub-dials flanking the center. The Portugieser line dates to 1939, when two Portuguese merchants asked IWC for a wristwatch with the accuracy of a marine chronometer, and IWC answered by fitting a large pocket-watch movement into a wristwatch case. The modern chronograph version is clean, refined, and expensive enough to signal ambition without being ostentatious. On a young DA about to jump to a high-paying corporate law job, it's exactly the right watch. Beachum is already dressing for the position he's moving toward, and the IWC says he has taste and means. It earns its screen time at the one moment his open-and-shut case stops looking open and shut.