Film Weekly meets Malcolm McDowell and other animals

Never apologise... Malcolm McDowell. Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

Those big staring eyes have it. Though I think for Malcolm McDowelll they've been as much a curse as a blessing. Mick Travis in If.... was a remarkable creation - public school boys shouldn't have such open eyes, eyes that saw how to start revolution and gobble up mini-skirted waitresses in the local cafe.

Malcolm had director Lindsay Anderson to thank for that part, and he does it profusely in a new filmed memoir Never Apologise, which is supposed to be a one-man-show about Lindsay but is really a show about Malcolm. Still, it's an entertaining soiree and Malcolm, as you can hear, is a walking compendium of anecdotes.

Have you met Malcolm? What does he mean to you? Did you bunk off school to see If...? Have you dressed like Alex on Hallowe'en? Have you been to Thamesmead? Have you committed acts of violence after seeing a bootleg copy of A Clockwork Orange? Do tell me your own McDowell anecdotes.

He's into golf now, as he tells me, and a round with Malcolm would be a treasure trove of guffaws and memories. He's still working, doing anything that he fancies while most of the time he spends on his Malibu ranch, raising young sons. It's rather extraordinary to see the man who was Alex in A Clockwork Orange so tanned and relaxed, but a relief to see him unrepentant. Have a listen.

More unusual beasts in Earth, a sweeping documentary from the BBC's Natural History unit, who've taken to turning their TV hits into 90 minute movies. Who can blame them? Strikes me that some of the best camera work in movies these days is in the nature docs and since March of the Penguins, there seems to be an appetite for this stuff in the movie houses.

This certainly looks wondrous on the big screen. It's not much of a story, but the set-pieces are breath taking and sometimes rather funny. It's a relief to watch animals without them talking these days after so much Hollywood animation - you're almost surprised that a polar bear cub doesn't talk like Ashley Olsen or that the arctic wolf isn't jabbering away like Dennis Leary.

We do get Patrick Stewart doing the narration tho, as if God himself were beaming down on his creations. Sir Ian McKellen was obviously busy and Morgan Freeman was probably in a meeting, but Patrick does just fine - not a patch on David Attenborough on the telly though. The film's co-director Mark Linfield tells me about its five-year journey to the big screen and why Attenborough was jettisoned for the movie.

I've got reviews of American Gangster for you and Brick Lane (a disappointment) and even a bit of the surprisingly fun Beowulf, which you really must see in 3-D.

But really, if there's one film to see this week, my tip is for Tsai Ming-Laing's I Don't Want To Sleep Alone, a lovely bit of modern Asian cinema, set in Kuala Lumpa, about love and loss and ghosts. There's a retrospective of his stuff at Bfi Southbank, but this new one, although slightly untypical of his work, is a very good place to start and one of the best foreign language films released here this year.

It works a gentle but powerful spell and for my money he's up there with Wong Kar-Wai and Hirokazu Kore-Eda as one of the best chroniclers of modern life in Asia.