It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This film marks the first starring role for Helen Mirren and she appears in quite a few tasteful nude scenes. Because of this, it's certainly not a film for the prudish!James Mason plays Bradley, an aging artist who feels that his work has stagnated. So, on a whim, he decides to relocate from Sydney to the wilds of Queensland in Northeast Australia. There, he lives in a hut and has a simple but lovely life along the beach. There he meets a gorgeous young lady, Cora (Mirren) and she stimulates his creative drive...and he begins making art that he is once again proud of and wants to make more. The problem is that she is very young and he is an older man...and her disgusting grandmother thinks that there's some hanky panky going on...which there isn't...at least for now!This is a slow but enjoyable film. What I appreciated is that while this is by no means a comedy, little comedic touches were used here and there. I also appreciate how different the film is. Although Mason ALSO starred in "Lolita", the tone and style of the two films are like night and day...and I prefer "Age of Consent".

Put together the worlds best actors with an Oscar winning director and what do you get? Probably worst film any of them have ever been in. Struggling for an explanation, I hone in on the awful wooden screenplay. But that's too generous. The director must get the blame for totally failing to bring out the talents of the normally skillful cast. Mason makes a go of it, apart from the unconvincing accent, but Helen Mirren appears woefully miscast as a downtrodden local girl with natural beauty and personality that is supposed to inspire the artist. She does not demonstrate enough rough edges to be believable. Helen Mirren has just stepped out of the Royal Shakespeare Company (as the cast credits insists on reminding us) and the director should have realised that, and demanded more of the actors. Mind you, I don't recall her ever playing this type of role again.

This is a quirky and highly eccentric film. 'Over the top' is an inadequate description. The sight of James Mason with a beard and a deep tan doing an Australian accent is eerie and unsettling. He does not sustain the accent very well, but he tries mightily. And once he even convincingly says: 'It's byute!' He is meant to be a famous Australian artist, and to convince us that he is in the correct milieu, he sits in front of a book about Sidney Nolan, and just to rub it in even further, 'Sid' and Arthur Boyd are mentioned on television. So the scene is set. But what Nolan and Boyd probably never did was go and live alone in a run-down shack on an island at the Great Barrier Reef in North Queensland, and paint a naked nymph. Not that they didn't fancy naked nymphs, it's just that, well, the Great Barrier Reef??? A hut??? Alone??? This may be what drew Mason to the project, since he and Michael Powell jointly produced it, and that means they were serious. Mason must have wanted a jolly good holiday in the sun, far from his austere Switzerland where he lived, and a naked girl cavorting around him also must have seemed just the thing. That naked girl is none other than Miss Mironov, better known as Helen Mirren, and she was aged 24 at the time. Over the years I have become exasperated at hearing all my male friends gasp with lust about Mironov. She never did anything for me, but I am in the extreme minority, indeed have often been met with expostulations of disbelief when I confessed my indifference. What was wrong with me? That is a question many people have speculated about, without coming to any sound conclusions. If being turned off by Mironov is a sign of something, then I plead guilty. But apart from that, she is of course a superb actress, and she even does very well in this role which could easily have been silly. Instead, she manages to be convincing. And that was not easy, as the story is in so many ways ridiculous. This was Michael Powell's last effort at directing, after which he passed beyond the Great Barrier Reef. The film may be feeble in countless ways, but it is genuinely amusing and its affectionate sending-up of the Ossies by portraying wildly caricatured Ossie types was very funny. Mason's friend Nat, played by Jack MacGowran, is as outré as a character actor can get, but nevertheless believable. He overacts so emphatically that he is simply hilarious. Yes, the film is engrossing in its own bizarre fashion. For the time it was meant to be highly erotic, and doubtless was, but in those days, things were simpler. Even the phrase 'age of consent' is no longer used. After all, now that girls of ten are routinely pregnant, what is the 'age of consent' any longer but a fig leaf to mask the hypocrisy of the older people who insist on believing that young people are still demure? Today, the idea of a 24 year-old girl running around naked on a beach would not be a bit unusual, or even a 17 year-old, which is the supposed age of Mironov's character. There is no use taking this film seriously, instead it should be viewed as a comedy which was never intended to be anything but a romp. There is also a very clever dog star named Godfrey who gets a whole single screen credit to himself. (That is how whimsical this film really is!) His best trick is to rush back to the hut and slip his neck back into his collar which is tied up so that when James Mason arrives home, he does not know that Godfrey has been running along the beach playing for hours and, like all the people in this film, romping like mad.

In spite of the scandalous looking title, "Age of Consent" is not about a woman losing her virginity or a lolita-type relationship (because Helen Mirren looks underage the same way that Anne Hathaway looks underage). "Age of Consent" is simply about an artist (James Mason) searching for his artistic inspiration in Australia and finally finding his very own muse named Cora (Helen Mirren) who does a lot of naked posing for him.Now if you are looking for a thought provoking or profound film about the human condition, "Age of Consent" is not for you. But if you already had a few beers on a Friday night and are looking for some light entertainment with a bit of charm, then this film is just right. "Age of Consent" has everything you (as one of the guys) would want to see in a film after getting drunk: a funny dog (Godfrey, who almost steals the show), a naked 24 year old Helen Mirren, lots of nature, some amusing locals, a naked 24 year old Helen Mirren, more nature, marine life and oh yes, getting to see 24 year old Helen Mirren nude! It is not a masterpiece, but I have to admit I watched "Age of Consent" to the end.