• Butterfly Jam opened the 2026 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and is Kantemir Balagov’s English-language debut
• Barry Keoghan plays Azik, a hapless Circassian diner cook and single dad in Newark, NJ
• Riley Keough and Harry Melling co-star as his pregnant sister and reckless best friend
• Critics praise the cast and Balagov’s visual craft but find the story uneven and meandering
• The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution

Barry Keoghan has made a career out of playing men you probably shouldn’t trust but can’t stop watching. In Butterfly Jam, Kantemir Balagov’s long-awaited third feature and English-language debut, that quality gets a full workout — and the results are as maddening and magnetic as you’d expect.

The film opened the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes 2026 to a reception that could generously be called complicated. Critics largely agree that Balagov’s formal gifts are extraordinary, that Keoghan is doing something genuinely interesting, and that the whole thing is about 20 minutes too committed to its own gorgeous aimlessness. Whether that’s a dealbreaker depends entirely on your patience for movies that operate on feel rather than plot.

A Diner, a Delen, and a Very Bad Dad

Set inside Newark’s small, insular Circassian-American community — a diaspora rarely seen on screen — Butterfly Jam centers on Azik (Keoghan), a cauliflower-eared line cook at his family’s diner who is, by most measures, a disaster. He’s a single father to 16-year-old Temir (newcomer Talha Akdogan), a gifted high school wrestler who is already more responsible than his dad. He’s the younger sibling to Zalya (Riley Keough), the heavily pregnant, bone-tired woman who actually keeps the diner running. And he’s best friends with Marat (Harry Melling), a volatile, wannabe-tough-guy whose greatest business venture involves a secondhand candyfloss machine.

Azik’s one real skill — and the film makes sure you know it — is his delen, a traditional Circassian fried flatbread stuffed with potato and cheese. When a prosperous cousin announces plans to open a high-end restaurant in Newark and becomes obsessed with Azik’s cooking, it briefly looks like our man might actually get somewhere. He won’t. But watching him try is, for a while, genuinely charming.

Keoghan plays Azik with a scrappy, stumbling exuberance — think Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy from Mean Streets if Johnny Boy somehow had a kid and kept going. There’s a melancholy under-achievement baked into every scene, a man who boasts that he can “make a jam out of anything” while consistently making a mess of everything. He takes his son to see a sex worker as a reward for winning a wrestling match. He kidnaps a pelican from the beach to cheer up his pregnant sister. He describes himself to Temir, entirely seriously, as “a fairy tale.”

It is, as one reviewer put it, a film that describes itself as “a masculine story told in pink” — and that tonal contradiction is either its greatest strength or its central problem, depending on where you sit.

What the Critics Are Saying

Across the board, Balagov’s craft gets nothing but respect. Cinematographer Jomo Fray — fresh off Nickel Boys — shoots Newark in burnt oranges and dusky pinks, alternating between stately amber-hued compositions and urgent handheld work that keeps the film’s restless energy alive even when the story stalls. The score from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine layers unplaceable synthetic textures against breathy human sounds, consistently unsettling in the best way.

One scene in particular has drawn unanimous admiration: Azik and Temir roam a quiet Newark block setting off every car alarm in succession, the resulting symphony of light and noise becoming something like a protest — two overlooked people demanding the world notice them. It’s the kind of image that sticks with you long after the credits.

But the script, co-written with Marina Stepnova, is where things get thornier. The film opens with a flash-forward to Temir announcing his father’s death, then immediately pulls the rug out, rewinding to Azik in something close to peak form. From there it freewheels through a series of anecdotal set pieces — the delen, the pelican, the prostitute, a violent incident around the hour mark that shifts the entire register — without ever quite committing to what kind of story it wants to tell. Is it a father-son drama? An immigrant displacement saga? A character study of a profoundly eccentric man? Balagov and Stepnova seem to want all three, and the seams show.

Variety called it “agreeably shaggy” and praised Balagov’s “unsentimental kinship” with his characters, while noting the story “sometimes unfolds with less conviction and credibility.” Deadline found it ultimately “floundering in its last half-hour,” pointing to a third act that dissolves into “an explosion of baffling non-sequiturs.” IndieWire was the most generous, arguing the film earns its strangeness as “a bittersweet fable” and a “half-formed fairy tale about the magic baked into even the most anguished of family histories” — though even that reading came with a caveat that the ending is “slightly difficult to swallow.”

The Casting Question Nobody Can Quite Resolve

An Irish actor, a British actor, and Elvis Presley’s granddaughter playing Circassian-Americans. It’s a choice that multiple reviewers flagged and none could fully explain away — though most landed on a version of “it works anyway.”

Keough, in particular, brings a quiet weight to Zalya that makes the character’s exhaustion feel completely real, even if the script gives her less to do than she deserves. Melling, who was so convincingly subservient in last year’s Pillion, is equally convincing here as a man whose internalized powerlessness is just one bad night away from something terrible. And Keoghan — who played a similarly reckless dadchild in Andrea Arnold’s Bird — brings the kind of strange, rolling physicality that makes even his most absurd choices feel oddly plausible.

The real revelation, though, may be Talha Akdogan as Temir. The young newcomer anchors the film’s emotional core with a performance that captures the particular misery of being the adult in a relationship with your own parent — a kid alternating between recessive adolescent awkwardness and quiet, devastating clarity. “You’re weak,” he tells his father at one point, and the line lands because Akdogan makes you feel exactly how long Temir has been sitting on it.

The Bigger Picture

What makes Butterfly Jam worth engaging with — frustrations and all — is the context Balagov brings to it. The film was originally conceived in his North Caucasus hometown of Nalchik before his public condemnation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine forced him into exile in the U.S. The Newark Circassian community, a real and largely invisible diaspora descended from a territory conquered by Russia, became the vehicle for his own immigrant anxieties. There’s nothing heavy-handed about it — Balagov doesn’t underline the political subtext — but it gives the film’s portrait of people who are perpetually not-quite-settled a resonance that a more conventional immigrant drama might have spelled out too loudly.

Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole is widely considered a masterpiece, and the shadow of that film hangs over Butterfly Jam in ways that are both inevitable and a little unfair. This is a looser, stranger, more deliberately frustrating film — one that operates on musical logic, as The Wrap noted, “establishing an unusual register, settling into an uncommon groove, then simply riffing within it.” If you’re looking for the disciplined tragedy of Beanpole, you won’t find it here.

What you will find is a filmmaker of genuine, restless talent doing something genuinely risky — and a cast committed enough to follow him wherever he goes, even when the destination turns out to be a Newark diner where a man is proudly serving his friends jam made from butterflies.

Butterfly Jam premiered at Cannes 2026 and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

The post Barry Keoghan Plays a Lovable Mess in ‘Butterfly Jam’ appeared first on Cream.

• Priscilla Presley, 80, spoke candidly about family drift at a Las Vegas speaking event on May 2
• She said Lisa Marie’s 2023 death left her feeling “separated” from granddaughters Harper, Finley, and Riley
• Son Navarone Garibaldi pushed back, saying the fractures began with Benjamin Keough’s 2020 suicide
• Navarone also said Lisa Marie’s death has paradoxically brought the family closer together now
• Riley Keough, who became sole Graceland trustee after a legal battle with Priscilla, previously described the aftermath as “chaos”

Priscilla Presley has opened up about the quiet but real distance that’s grown between her and her family in the three years since losing her daughter Lisa Marie Presley — and the conversation got complicated fast.

Speaking at a public event at the Westgate in Las Vegas on May 2, alongside her son Navarone Garibaldi, the 80-year-old actress reflected on how Lisa Marie’s sudden death in January 2023 reshaped the family’s rhythm. “It’s kind of separated us in a way,” Priscilla said. “You know, we would get together and have meals and have family.”

She pointed specifically to Lisa Marie’s youngest daughters, twins Harper and Finley Lockwood — whom the late singer shared with ex-husband Michael Lockwood — as an example of how life has naturally pulled everyone apart. “The girls are 18 now, the twins,” Priscilla said. “So they have their boyfriends and, you know, do their thing.” She was quick to add that despite the distance, they’re still “close” — but before she could finish the thought, Navarone stepped in with a different read on the timeline.

Navarone Says the Fractures Started With Benjamin

“I think actually losing Ben was the first thing that separated us,” Navarone, 39, said, referring to Benjamin Keough, Lisa Marie’s son with her first husband Danny Keough, who died by suicide in July 2020 at age 27. “When you would think that should be something that would bring everyone together, that somehow separated us further because everyone grieves in different ways.”

He didn’t sugarcoat it. “Everybody put blame on somebody in different ways, and just felt different ways about it. Somehow, that separated us further.”

It’s a raw and honest thing to say publicly — and it tracks with something Lisa Marie herself wrote just months before her own death. In an essay she shared with People for National Grief Awareness Day in August 2022, she described the isolation that can follow a devastating loss: “Your old ‘friends’ and even your family can and will run for the hills,” she wrote. “The unrelenting reality is that you are FORCED into this horrendous ‘club,’ if you will, that you never wanted to be in or a part of.” She said she’d come to cherish “the few who have stayed in there with us throughout this entire nightmare.”

At the time, few could have imagined that Lisa Marie herself would be gone just five months later.

A Family Finding Its Way Back

For all the grief and distance, Navarone ended on something closer to hope. He said that in the wake of Lisa Marie’s death, the family is “coming closer together” and “letting go of those feelings.” It’s a silver lining that sounds hard-won.

Lisa Marie Presley died on January 12, 2023, from a small bowel obstruction — a complication from bariatric surgery. She was 54. Just days before, she and Priscilla had attended the 80th Golden Globe Awards together, where Austin Butler won Best Actor for his role in Elvis, the Baz Luhrmann biopic that both women had championed publicly.

After Lisa Marie’s death, the family’s grief became entangled with legal conflict. Priscilla contested the validity of a 2016 amendment to Lisa Marie’s will that had removed her as trustee of the Graceland estate and replaced her with Riley Keough and Benjamin. The dispute eventually settled — Riley, now 36, was named sole trustee of Graceland in August 2023 after agreeing to pay Priscilla $1 million plus $400,000 in legal fees.

“When my mom passed, there was a lot of chaos in every aspect of our lives,” Riley told Vanity Fair at the time. “Everything felt like the carpet had been ripped out and the floor had melted from under us. Everyone was in a bit of a panic to understand how we move forward, and it just took a minute to understand the details of the situation, because it’s complicated. There was a bit of upheaval, but now everything’s going to be how it was.”

Priscilla, for her part, said at the time that “Elvis would be proud” of the settlement, and that “Lisa’s wishes are what are most important to all of us.”

Riley — who has two young children with husband Ben Smith-Petersen and recently starred in Daisy Jones and the Six — has largely stepped into the role of family anchor since her mother’s passing. And while the Presleys have never been a family that does things simply, there’s something in Navarone’s words that suggests they’re at least moving in the same direction again.

The post Priscilla Presley: Lisa Marie’s Death ‘Separated’ Our Family appeared first on Cream.