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 turquoise rings and gets real lonely when Russell spends entire nights away from home." Jolie then co-starred with Denzel Washington in "The Bone Collector" (1999), playing a police officer who reluctantly helps Washington's quadriplegic detective track down a serial killer. The film grossed $151.5 million worldwide, but was critically unsuccessful. Terry Lawson of the "Detroit Free Press" concluded, "Jolie, while always delicious to look at, is simply and woefully miscast." Jolie next took the supporting role of a sociopathic mental patient in "Girl, Interrupted" (1999), an adaptation of Susanna Kaysen's memoir of the same name. While Winona Ryder played the