Angelina Jolie critic Peter Stack wrote, "Jolie, working through an overwritten part, is a sensation as the desperate club crawler learning truths about what she's willing to gamble." She won the Breakthrough Performance Award from the National Board of Review. In 1999, Jolie starred in the comedy-drama "Pushing Tin", alongside John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, and Cate Blanchett. The film met with mixed reception from critics, and Jolie's character—Thornton's seductive wife—was particularly criticized; writing for "The Washington Post", Desson Howe dismissed her as "a completely ludicrous writer's creation of a free-spirited woman who weeps over hibiscus plants that die, wears lots of
Megan Fox of negativity and she did not want to emulate it. The media often comparing Fox to actress Angelina Jolie, dubbing her the "next Angelina Jolie", also affected her image. Amid this and reports that she was to replace Jolie in a new "Lara Croft" film, Fox commented that the comparisons indicate a lack of creativity on the part of the media, and attributed them to both she and Jolie being brunette, having tattoos, cursing, and mentioning and joking about sex, "which people find outrageous". Lynn Hirschbergnov of "The New York Times" opined that "the Jolie comparison would probably have been