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 directing the film, she co-wrote the screenplay with her longtime friend Loung Ung, whose memoirs about the regime's child labor camps served as its source material. Intended primarily for a Cambodian audience, the film was produced directly for Netflix, which allowed for the use of an exclusively Khmer cast and script. Jolie is next contracted to reprise the role of Maleficent in Disney's sequel, "Maleficent II". In 2018, Jolie was reported to be starring in and producing the upcoming film adaptation of a 2014 "James Scott" novel “The Kept”. Jolie first witnessed the effects of a humanitarian crisis while filming