• Amy Winehouse was in the audience for a performance of Cinderella and, reportedly, heckled the cast. She shouted things like:

"He's fucking behind you" and "Fuck Cinders, Prince Charming, marry me." She also called the ugly stepsisters "bitches." When a manager tried to usher her from the venue, she kicked him between the legs. Allegedly! Police are investigating… [The Sun]

• Foul play is not suspected in Brittany Murphy's death. [People]
• Here, sources say that Brittany Murphy was sick and vomiting before she died and was taking prescription meds for flu-like symptoms. In addition, she had diabetes. [TMZ]
• Brittany Murphy was fired from a horror film called The Caller two weeks ago. In addition, an insider on another horror/thriller, Something Wicked, says she was "barely there" when called on to shoot her scenes and would "go in and out of consciousness in the middle of takes." This source and the crew assumed she was on prescription drugs. But apparently, in 2001, she told a reporter that "even if she wanted to she couldn't take drugs because she'd had a heart condition since she was a little girl." [The Wrap]
• In this piece, Hollywood insiders claim Brittany Murphy was "a mess," had "too many drugs and not enough food" and "was a space cadet." [The Daily Beast]
• Here, a neighbor describes how rescue workers tried to save Brittany's life, although the woman says, "I think she was dead already." [Radar Online]
• The medical staff at the hospital tried to revive Brittany Murphy three times. [Radar Online]
• Leave it to The Sun to keep things classy and tasteful; the headline here is "Brittany 'Killed by Jacko Drugs.'" [The Sun]
• Brittany Murphy's family has released a statement: "The sudden loss of our beloved Brittany is a terrible tragedy. She was our daughter, our wife, our love and a shining star. We ask you to respect our privacy at this time." [ET]
• Madonna and Guy Ritchie are reuniting. For Christmas. A source says: "Madonna is flying in for 24 hours so Guy can spend Christmas Day with the children. Things are amicable between them and the children love Christmas at Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, which Guy has turned into a Santa's grotto." Listen: "Grotto" is for moss-covered sex playpens. Not for Kris Kringle. [Daily Express]
• Madonna is "the most written-about celebrity of the past decade in Britain." [The Sun]
• Tiger Woods' wife Elin Nordegren is allegedly seeking sole custody of their kids and half of his $600 million. [Radar Online, NY Post]
• Tiger Woods' mom: "Hurt, angry and disappointed" with her song. Apparently she likes Elin and — no shock here — adores her grandkids. [NY Post]
• Tiger Woods's yacht, Privacy, has set sail from Florida. A source says it's headed to he Bahamas. Will some alone time on the open seas be good for the golfer? [People]
• Strippers have found that Chris Brown acts like "a perfect gentleman." [Page Six]
• Charles Barkley is hosting SNL in 2010, and this columnist asks, "Could [good friend] Tiger Woods appear with him?" [MSNBC Scoop]
• This entire article is about how Sarah Jessica Parker's dress clung to her after a gust of wind. Eyeroll. [NY Daily News]
• Breaking: Catherine Zeta-Jones has a great rack. [Page Six]
• No surprise: The ratings for Jersey Shore are up. An interesting, voyeuristic anthropological study? Comedy gold? Trainwreck? Doesn't matter. America's in love. [TV BY The Numbers]
• In this column, Jersey Shore's Pauly D. explains how he gets his hair to do what it does: "It takes me 25 minutes to do the whole process and get it right." [NY Daily News]
• Barbara Walters and Frank Langella??!?! Apparently he's been her plus one at a bunch of events. She says: "Frank and I have been friends for many years and will continue to be friends for many years, but it's not a romance." [Page Six]
• "Roman Polanski is finishing the edit of his latest movie Ghost from his house arrest in Switzerland, surrounded by family and bombarded by telephone calls of support." [AP]
• Um, if you, like, me, enjoy handbags, be sure to click here and see Gossip Girl's costume designer, Eric Daman, in the dreamiest closet of your dreamy dreams. [NY Post story, slideshow]
• Tila Tequila has tweeted: "BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: I am going to become a SURROGATE MOTHER for my brother & his Wife!!! That is my xmas present to them. Im pregnant!!!!" This should be interesting. [ONTD via Daily Express]
• One of Jon Bon Jovi's sons was taken to the hospital yesterday, but there are no further details. [TMZ]
• Guys! I could not even read this item about Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. because the picture accompanying the piece makes it look like they're going to make out and I got excited/distracted. [Gatecrasher]
• Evi Quaid was arrested in Marfa, Texas on Saturday — she and husband Randy did not show up to court appearances after being busted skipping out on a steep hotel bill. [Radar Online]
• Randy Quaid has also been arrested. [Radar Online]
• Did Claudia Schiffer get special treatment when she was on the train that got stuck in the Chunnel? [Daily Express]
• Was PETA postergal Bethenny Frankel wearing fur over the weekend? More importantly: Was she on the subway?!?! [Gatecrasher]
• Hollywood is out of ideas, part CXXIII: Taylor Lautner might star in a remake of Vision Quest. [Daily Express]
• Let's not even talk about the 21 Jump Street movie starring Jonah Hill. [ONTD via Variety]
• The third Jackass movie will be 3D. [ONTD via Coming Soon]
• Rage Against the Machine pissed off Simon Cowell by hijacking the UK charts and landing the Christmas No. 1 spot. (One of his X Factor contestants was on track to score number 1.) [Daily Mail, Gawker]
• In a poll of 1,000 children under 10, Simon Cowell came in first as "the most famous person in the world." The Queen was second and God was third. [Mirror]
• Kate Winslet was "undone," meaning moved, by Crazy Heart, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jeff Bridges. [Page Six]
• In 2010, Mary J. Blige will be a guest judge on American Idol, come out with a line of sunglasses and a fragrance. She says of her photograph on her new album cover: "Look at my shoulders, where I carry everything. Look at the strength of this person who continues to have trials and tribulations like everyone, and who by the grace of God makes it out." [USA Today]
• Did Nancy O'Dell leave Access Hollywood because Billy Bush is a diva and a jerk? [Gatecrasher]
• Wait, what? Def Leppard is developing a cartoon series?!?! [Reuters]
• "I don't want to just be a kind of bouncing board for men to flex their muscles and look brave and courageous and understanding, while I just look bleary-eyed in the background. No, I don't want to do that. You can also do leading roles that are riveting, but they tend to be – well, certainly in my world – they're the lower-budget, more arthouse films, because I'm not on the right list to be asked to do those really great meaty roles that you see Meryl Streep or Cate Blanchett doing." — But dammit, Kristin Scott Thomas, you're amazing! She also says of Botoxed actresses: "I can't bear is seeing [people who look] like photocopies. And there's that strange waxy look that I find disturbing." [Guardian]
• "Some women can buy their own shoes, some women don't want to go to lunch, some women like to cook, but they all need sex therapy. It's the one thing every woman's going to need sooner or later. Except a nun. So this album is not for nuns." — Robin Thicke. [AP]
• "Well, I know I'm not Quasimodo but as far as I'm concerned, you know, I think I'm not aesthetically beautiful. I have a broken nose here. I had a tracheotomy when I was a kid. I had broken capillaries. I always ask my husband, do I look fat in this dress? Can you see that spot on my face?" — Catherine Zeta-Jones. [Daily Express]
• "I always felt connected to her as we shared a very special experience in our lives together. I feel love in my heart for her – and hope she is at peace. This is truly sad." — Alicia Silverstone on Clueless costar Brittany Murphy. [People]

The Los Angeles Times:

It also must be emphasized that even though director Howard had all these first-class elements to work with, "Frost/Nixon" wouldn't have succeeded as well as it does without his experience, his professionalism and his skills. He's successfully opened the play up without pushing anything too hard, and he's deftly avoided the sentimentality that, with the exception of the underrated "The Missing," has often been a quality of his films.

The result is involving, engrossing cinema — more thrilling, in fact, than Howard's "The Da Vinci Code" — filmmaking of a type rarely seen anymore and sorely missed.

Wall Street Journal:

What Ron Howard gets, to a degree that's astonishing in a two-hour film, is the density and complexity, as well as the generous entertainment quotient, of Peter Morgan's screenplay. (Mr. Morgan previously wrote "The Queen," in which Michael Sheen played Tony Blair, and "The Last King of Scotland.") "Frost/Nixon" does more than dramatize the high points of the TV interviews. In the frantic run-up to the recorded interviews, and during the early videotape sessions, the film gives us the collateral drama of a talk-show host, accustomed to celebrity chatter, trying desperately to play the role of a serious journalist.

Salon:

But by the time the Frost-Nixon interviews wound to a close — in real life, the 29 hours of taped footage were edited and aired over five nights — Frost, thanks to some wiliness and a little bit of luck, had coaxed his slippery subject into a tacit admission of guilt in the Watergate scandal. And right there, I've gone ahead and given away the ending to "Frost/Nixon" — but this is a story in which what happens is far less interesting than how it happens. Howard has made a picture for grown-ups, a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up. That's particularly refreshing around holiday time, when the studios roll out all their big Oscar-bait pictures, bestowing upon us their most boring, stately and somber works — anything that spells "quality" with a capital "Q," even if genuine craftsmanship is sorely missing.

The New York Times:

And devour Mr. Langella does, chomp chomp. Artfully lighted and shot to accentuate the character’s trembling, affronted jowls, his shoulders hunched, face bunched, he creeps along like a spider, alternately retreating into the shadows and pouncing with a smile. That smile should give you nightmares, but Mr. Howard, a competent craftsman who tends to dim the lights in his movies even while brightening their themes (“A Beautiful Mind”), has neither the skill nor the will to draw out a dangerous performance from Mr. Langella, something to make your skin crawl or heart leap. Unlike Oliver Stone, who invested Nixon (a memorable Anthony Hopkins) with Shakespearean heft but refused to sentimentalize him, this is a portrait designed to elicit a sniffy tear or two along with a few statuettes.

Slate:

Frost/Nixon's emotional climax is, in my view, the script's weakest moment. On the eve of those last two crucial interviews, Nixon makes a drunken late-night phone call to Frost in his hotel room and feeds him the oldest line in the serial-killer-vs.-cop playbook: Deep down, you and me, we're the same. Langella makes the most of this booze-sodden monologue, but its central premise—that Nixon and Frost shared an insecurity about social class that fueled their drive to succeed—seems more British than American: Wasn't Nixon's persecution complex far too vast to be reduced to class anxiety? If our 37th president has proved such an enduring subject for on-screen fictions (see Mark Feeney's 2004 book, Nixon at the Movies), it's precisely because we can never finally fathom his bottomless pathologies. If we did, we wouldn't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

USA Today:

Howard establishes a mounting sense of tension, interspersing interviews with talking-head-style analyses from each camp. Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen and Kevin Bacon are excellent in these roles.

Morgan seamlessly blends actual interview dialogue and imagined conversations.

The film convincingly conveys how uncomfortable the 37th president was in his own skin.

NPR:

Happily, director Ron Howard takes a quasi-documentary approach that has the effect of giving Frost more heft on screen — there's news footage, plus behind-the-scenes shots of TV monitors, all conspiring to make it clear that he's better at using this emotionally cool medium than Nixon, especially in the interview's big showdown.

Entertainment Weekly:

With the transcript as his guide, Morgan explores psychological terrain: how Frost found the chutzpah to land the interviews; how Nixon played cat and mouse with his interlocutor when asked to admit wrongdoing and apologize; how both men of humble beginnings felt stung by the scorn of those born with more 
privilege; and how both were superb manipulators. But Sheen (who played the very model of a modern British go-getter as Tony Blair in The Queen, also written by Morgan) and Langella (operating at the peak of his powers) are disciplined enough to crop their performances to close-up size. (The sizing echoes the look of the 
 actual interviews.) And Howard is smart 
 to enhance the one-on-ones with journalistic context, weaving archival Watergate-era 
 footage into his fictionalized re-creation.

The New York Observer:

Mr. Howard and Mr. Morgan have very astutely established Frost’s mercurial personality in advance by having him brazenly pick up Rebecca Hall’s all-too-willing Caroline Cushing on a Concorde flight from Australia to California. Indeed, the impression is given that Mr. Frost habitually makes passes at any lone and attractive woman on his many worldwide flights.

The New Yorker:

“Frost/Nixon” offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can’t escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn’t warranted by the events. Why is it meant to be so important to us whether David Frost revives his career? Frost and Reston did finally goad Nixon into saying that he let the American people down, and that he believed that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal,” and they have extracted a considerable amount of copy out of the broadcasts (including two books). But it’s possible that both journalists and playwright have confused a media coup (and a less important one than that of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) with a cleansing act that forever chastened the Presidency. It was anything but that: after all, twenty-four years later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney entered the White House.

Newsweek:

Langella and Sheen originated these roles on stage, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing them. Sheen, who was Tony Blair in Morgan's "The Queen," dazzles as the debonair media high-wire artist holding on for dear life when the slippery Nixon ducks all his early-round punches. More presidential than the real president, Langella gives Nixon a stature and poignancy that the man himself rarely displayed: it's a towering, witty performance that reaches its peak in the drunken late-night phone call he makes to Frost, sizing him up as a man, like himself, with a fiercely competitive chip on his shoulder. The scene is Morgan's invention, but it's an illuminating, inspired fiction. Not everything in "Frost/Nixon" happened in real life, but both sides would probably agree it should have.

Frost/Nixon:

A totally mesmerizing battle of the wills between the occasionally charming yet wily Nixon and the increasingly desperate Frost. Supporting roles are bolstered by Kevin Bacon as Nixon’s ex-military pitbull Chief of Staff and Platt and Rockwell as the crackerjack researchers dying to crucify Nixon.

'Frost/Nixon' opens today in theaters nationwide.