In the west, critics have hailed House of Flying Daggers as the most beautiful martial arts film ever made. In China, the home of its director, Zhang Yimou, the epic has been given a resounding raspberry.

A big budget, furious-fighting, lush-coloured fantasy set in the Tang dynasty, House of Flying Daggers cost 100m renminbi (￡6.7m), making it one of the most expensive films ever made in China. Its cast has Asia's three biggest stars: Zhang Ziyi of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame; Andy Lau; and Takeshi Kaneshiro.

The rich cinematography, a hallmark of the work of Zhang, a former photographer, led audiences to break into spontaneous applause at its European screening at Cannes this year. The film is tipped to win the best foreign film Oscar. One British reviewer enthused: "Can this film get any more dashing or beautiful without being arrested?"

The view from China, home of the kung fu genre, has been not just cool, but glacial.

Although House of Flying Daggers grossed a reasonable 150m renminbi at the box office, newspapers and internet bulletin boards said it was a triumph of cinematic style over plot substance.

"Powerfully soporific" was the head line on a review in the Beijing Times; "Zhang should go back to photography", suggested the Information Times. The harshest was the Beijing Star Daily, saying it "struggled to pass the test of a real kung fu movie".

Zhang remains a hero to cinemagoers, but his fans worry he has moved too far from his auteur roots in dark, elegiac stories of rural life. At least one was deemed so subversive it was banned by the communist government's censors.

He is now closer to the establishment, as shown by his video promotions for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He is also looking at overseas revenues to finance his lavish sets and exotic locale. "We definitely needed a foreign market to recover our investment," he told New York Times. "So I had to think about the overseas situation, and whether western audiences would understand the story."

However, he appears to have left behind his home audience. Li Erwei, an influential critic, said: "House of Flying Daggers has an illogical plot and weak characters. Such a celebrated and well-financed director really ought to have done better." Similar criticism did not hurt Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won an Oscar for best foreign film.