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 $478.2 million worldwide, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" was the seventh-highest grossing picture of the year and remained Jolie's highest-grossing live-action film for the next decade. Following a supporting role as the neglected wife of a CIA officer in Robert De Niro's "The Good Shepherd" (2006), Jolie starred as Mariane Pearl in the documentary-style drama "A Mighty Heart" (2007). Based on Pearl's memoir of the same name, the film chronicles the kidnapping and murder of her husband, "The Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Pearl, in Pakistan. Although the biracial Pearl had personally chosen Jolie for the role, the casting drew racial