Metacritic reviews

A vanity project so preposterous it deserves to become an instant camp hit.

This skillfully made Italian heart-tugger was a success on home ground. Its star, Marco Filiberti, in an audacious writing and directing debut, has lots on his mind and much in his heart, and as a filmmaker displays a Douglas Sirkian flair for finding substance in melodrama.

Tries to be too many things, none very convincingly: plea for tolerance, docu-style character study, old-fashioned weepie.

It can make for entertainingly silly viewing, but it should come as no surprise that the film's plea for tolerance and unexpectedly tragic ending -- an unfortunate throwback to the Dark Ages of gays in films -- rings equally hollow.

Slipping from fantasy to soap opera without any authorial control, pic's best hope is to be recognized as some kind of cult movie of badness.

This feeble comedy-tragedy has Sirkian aspirations but never misses an opportunity to settle for being flesh-friendly gay-film-festival fodder. This is a vanity project, not so much acted as posed.

He's (Marco Filiberti) his own best audience, and Adored is best left to his own enjoyment.

Not only is Adored amateurish and mawkish even by the standards of American "gaysploitation" cinema, it's weirdly shy about showing nudity and sex.

The film's witlessness keeps any satirical potential submerged well below soap opera levels. Filiberti's self-casting exacerbates this already shoddy melodrama: Frequent come-hither stares beaming from his patently sub-marquee mug provide one too many non-ironic "Zoolander" moments.

Adored stands at the crossroads where Telemundo and beefcake magazines collide, but for strangers to that intersection, the film's camp value is exceeded only by its tedium.