It's close to forty years now since movies like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and, best of all, The Opening of Misty Beethoven burst onto the scene with what American cinema regarded as an hitherto unimaginable combination - plot and porn! It was a brief flowering, one that nodded towards the tremendous advances taking place in European XXX cinema at the same time, but which was swiftly cut down again by any number of factors, ranging from increased legislation to the arrival of VHS, and onto the questionable insistence that audiences really didn't want plot. They wanted sex, and the more of it, the merrier.

That latter picture hasn't really changed too much, with the consequence that even the most carefully schemed out sex movie (and there's a lot of them around) is forced to double its running time by dragging every XXX scene out for fifteen, twenty minutes... at the end of which, almost without fail, you've completely forgotten what the actual story is. Thank goodness for fast forward buttons.

Throat: A Cautionary Tale might surprise you, then. Or maybe not. Star Sasha Grey is now firmly established as one of the adult industry's most adept performers, both in and out of the bedroom, and the fact that a large part of the film's direction is drawn from the same place as Deep Throat - that is, a girl whose clitoris is located around her tonsils - does not detract from a beautifully shot and, for the most part, exquisitely executed movie.

The murder mystery that is at the heart of the story hangs together well; and tracing back from the discovery of the corpse itself, the life of the victim is played out with a great deal of... I want to say "sensitivity," although there is little of that in her life. The sex itself tends towards the extreme without quite getting into the realms of out-and-out off-putting, and given the nature of the lead character's anatomy, there's some great fellatio action.

But still we journey from raw romp to rough ride more through a sense of gathering trepidation than any actual arousal. Which is a courageous stance for any XXX movie to take, and one that may or may not work to its advantage. Personally I enjoy what has been called "porn noir," and if you're watching as much for the movie as the messing around, you will be similarly entranced. Like Gia" Portrait of a Porn Star, [italic}Throat] has a lot more on its mind than just a laundry list of bedhopping encounters, and so long as you remember that - and don't anticipate the movie getting you in the mood for much more than introspection and conversation - you should find it a rewarding watch.

You'll probably still want to keep the fast forward handy, though.