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
Angelina Jolie definitely feels like something she has already done, but she does add an unmistakable dash of excitement and glamour." Jolie made a brief appearance as a fighter pilot in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow", a science fiction adventure shot entirely with actors in front of a bluescreen, and voiced her first family film, the DreamWorks animation "Shark Tale". Her supporting role as Queen Olympias in Oliver Stone's "Alexander", about the life of Alexander the Great, was met with mixed reception, particularly concerning her Slavic accent. Commercially, the film failed in North America, which Stone attributed to disapproval of