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We all know that it’s not actually as easy as it should be to break into Hollywood. Even with the huge number of bad movies that inundate our multiplexes every day, most of the best filmmakers, actors, writers, and other crew members work their asses off and never get to the plateaus of success that everyone dreams about. But there are a lucky few who get to a point where they can do pretty much whatever they want, barring a freak accident or a major meltdown (for an example of that, see Mel Gibson, who managed to direct a high-grossing movie about Jesus Christ and has now probably destroyed any goodwill he ever had). For these people, what they get next are carte blanche movies.

This week’s A-List looks at five major carte blanche movies from the past 15 years. Carte blanche movies are the ones that guarantee a director whatever they want, the ones that make it so you can do whatever you want with your goodwill. Some people, like Gibson, make mistakes in their personal lives and lose their carte blanche status. Some people use their carte blanche status to make movies that are so personal, so self-involved that no one wants to see them, and studios are hard-pressed to give the directors any money for anything, ever again. A few of these movies are pretty obvious, and one of them is directly inspired by this week’s big release in theaters. Either way, the directors of these movies still have carte blanche. Do they deserve it? Let’s find out.

The Dark Knight

How could this movie not be on the list? Before 2008, Christopher Nolan was regarded as an exciting visual director, one who could put his personal stamp on remakes of Swedish cop thrillers, adaptations of books about dueling magicians, and reboot the Batman series with at least one good movie. And then The Dark Knight changed things. Again, Nolan’s career had been full of movies that were, at the least, very, very good. But The Dark Knight helped move Nolan into the carte blanche category. Though he didn’t get any Oscar nominations, it’s hard to argue with one billion dollars worldwide. Unlike some of the other directors on this list, Nolan has used his status as the guy who could get anything made to make a passion project that could also be incredibly awesome.

Yes, readers, I’m of course talking about Inception, the highly anticipated release that comes out this week (something I’ve been talking about in the A-List for somewhere around eight billion years) to loads of fanfare. There have been some early reviews, and they’re all somewhere around the neighborhood of rapturous. The cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ken Watanabe, is to die for. The visuals remain vague yet jaw-dropping, and so on. Nolan had been working on the script for years, but was able to crack it later in his career, with money behind him. We can only hope that Inception is as awesome as it looks, but Nolan’s not likely to squander the goodwill engendered by The Dark Knight, a critically acclaimed, commercially beloved masterpiece that hasn’t lost its intense spark two years after the fact.

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