Hero, Fearless, House of Flying Daggers - many of Chinese cinema's recent exports have yearned for comparison to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but so far none have replicated the visual richness or narrative appeal of that film.

Sadly, we can add Curse of the Golden Flower to that list, a film dripping with aesthetic magnificence that unfortunately shares more common ground with a Shakespearian tragedy than the kind of martial arts fantasy we've come to expect from anything featuring Chow Yun Fat and endless barricades of soldiers.

Easy on the eye but disarmingly hollow, it's a case of style over substance nearly as traditional as the family values on show here.