It’s not every day you get to watch Academy Award winners Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman snuggle up in cozy sweaters, battle a centuries-old witch’s curse, and straight-up pants each other in a warm and wry sequel to a ’90s cult classic. But “Practical Magic 2” does indeed give you that chance, joining a sisterhood of recent studio revivals that don’t hold a candle to this one.
Coming on the heels of “Freakier Friday” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” director Susanne Bier’s new “Practical Magic 2″ is as easy to misunderstand as its magical leading ladies. Reuniting Bullock and Kidman as Sally and Gillian Owens, the dark fantasy rom-com catches up with the sisters 28 years after their last face-off with evil forces.
The original 1998 film, directed by Griffin Dunne, has its problems. A confused genre hybrid — cutely paraphrased in the sequel as that time the girls had to “bury a corpse beneath a rose bush” (technically true!) — the first “Practical Magic” combines dreamy visuals, horror tropes, and a jarring domestic violence drama for an effect that’s still baffling to behold decades later.
Critics trashed the movie, which also failed to make its money back at the box office, but the film found its audience gradually, eventually earning a place in repertory history as a Halloween comfort watch particularly beloved by millennial women. If you watch “Practical Magic” today, you can really feel its spell take hold around the 50-minute mark, when the Owens sisters and their wacky aunts, Frances and Jet (Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest, an Oscar nominee and two-time winner, respectively, lending the whole affair an improbable degree of prestige), get drunk on margaritas, dance around the kitchen to Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut,” and promptly take turns insulting each other over tequila shots.
“Practical Magic 2” begins by unraveling the happy ending of the first movie, although it’s worth emphasizing the sequel’s script is not a retcon. Both cinematic outings with the Owens sisters are based on Alice Hoffman’s book series, which continued expanding the family’s mythology long after Sally and Gillian had seemingly ended their bloodline’s pesky hex.
That makes the sequel’s reversal easier to swallow, as does some useful continuity behind the scenes — with original “Practical Magic” co-writer Akiva Goldsman returning to work alongside “Succession” and “Veep” veteran Georgia Pritchett, as well as Kelly Marcel, one of three story writers on “Cruella.”
As it turns out, the Owens sisters only broke part of their deadly ancestral curse back in 1998. In the years since, Sally has erased the magical memories of her twenty-something daughters, Kylie (Joey King) and Antonia (Maisie Williams), supposedly for their own good — and the spell cast by their [checks notes] great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother Maria Owens (Ema Cavolli) has sought fresh blood… twice.
With Sally once again mourning a late husband she loved dearly, and Gillian still soft-pedaling intimacy to avoid the same fate, the original Owens sisters are reintroduced through an emotional conflict that’s ultimately about choosing to let magic back into your life. When Maria’s spell threatens Kylie’s new boyfriend, Gideon (Xolo Maridueña), Sally is forced to question what all those years of self-denial and so-called “protection” really accomplished for her kids, if anything.
Escaping Maria’s tortured shadow requires excavating the Owens’ shared past, with a heartsick Kylie first hopping a plane to England in hopes of finding something that can save Gideon. Sally and Gillian aren’t far behind, and soon all three Owens women are on the ground investigating the thorny truth behind their family’s 17th-century matriarch — who survived an attempted hanging only to accidentally doom generations when the man she loved abandoned her anyway.
Departing the Owens’ iconic Massachusetts home for more of the movie than some die-hard fans might like, “Practical Magic 2” is nevertheless transporting. Shipping legacy characters abroad is a familiar nostalgia play that too often mistakes alternative scenery for fresh ideas, and the dramatically increased budget on display here occasionally works against Bier, whose glossy new sequel loses some of the handmade quality that helped the original endure.
That said, this journey is rooted in Hoffman’s mythology rather than bolted onto it. And that overall sense of purpose flows from a production unusually well-protected by the women who truly understand this fictional world’s appeal. The obvious appeal of the Bullock and Kidman bond is getting to watch the pair do anything together. Still, their tender and tickling reunion is brilliantly constructed.
Gillian remains the franchise’s sensitive nerve ending, with Kidman splashing her sparkly charisma across every frame. Relentlessly invading Sally’s personal space with the slouchy entitlement of a real-life sibling, the 59-year-old Australian-American actress shows off a youthful impishness that’s sadly absent from even the kink-tastic “Babygirl.” In one early scene, Gillian snags frosting from Jet’s ornate birthday cake and licks it off her finger, gifting viewers a version of Kidman as bubbly as she was in “Bewitched,” but she’s also subtly changed by the acidic sheen of grief she explored in “Big Little Lies.”
That surprisingly sensible perspective is precisely why Gillian believes Kylie and Antonia should have learned about witchcraft, Maria, and the Owens family’s curse years ago. Gillian wants her nieces to have the tools to live their adult lives to the fullest, and playfully needling Sally every chance she gets, Kidman commits her delightful familiarity with the real Bullock to film in splendid fashion. (Better still, look forward to Bullock stumbling over a log in galoshes, then promptly apologizing for “being a dick,” in a return to the killer comedic chops she boasted as a fish-out-water exec in “The Proposal.”)
Of course, Bullock is an unmatched heavyweight when it comes to steely sincerity, and there’s no doubt that Sally Owens is hurting. Even propelled by needle drops from Stevie Nicks and Florence + the Machine — not to mention, some of the coolest costumes a studio comedy has seen in forever — 62-year-old Bullock preserves the haunting sense of distance that so often accompanies repeat trauma and loss in every aspect of her captivating performance.
Stuck in the aftermath of not one, but two earth-shattering deaths that have made even Sally’s happiest new memories much harder to trust, she still insists on wearing a brave face for her children. Pain shines through the cracks of Bullock’s controlled exterior like a cosmic signal, and Sally’s insistence that’s she’s stronger alone gets harder to believe as the suspense wears on.
Enter Professor Ian Wright (Lee Pace), whom Sally and Gillian discover stark naked in his London apartment under the influence of dark magic. Once they’ve unbound him — and, critically, gotten the strapping 47-year-old man some goddamn pants(!!) — Ian’s attraction to Sally reveals itself as a two-way live wire. Bullock has shared more combustible chemistry with other leading men, but she and Pace are remarkably comfortable together. And the frankness underlying their oddly dorky connection also paints any potential relationship between them as tragic from the jump.
When the pair discuss the terrifying prospect of Sally putting herself out there romantically again, “Practical Magic 2” stops presenting the Owens’ curse as a mystical conceit and starts treating it as a brutally ordinary challenge that faces so many wonderful people. It’s impossible to overlook the accumulated lives of the real women reviving these characters in that sense, and both Bullock and Kidman deserve their flowers for not only starring in the 1998 film but evolving with its story.
“A life without magic is no life at all,” Gillian insists, radiating ferocious self-compassion.
“Practical Magic 2” never makes the mistake of suggesting romantic love is the only kind of love worth hazarding your heart for, and Kidman’s emotional openness ricochets throughout. In a handful of impressively resonant scenes with King, Kylie gives Gillian an entire new generation to encourage toward the messy exuberant existence that Sally, at least in the sequel’s first few acts, vows to keep at bay.
And when it comes to inheriting the spirit of “Practical Magic” overall, the former “Kissing Booth” actor fares considerably better than her closest co-star, Williams. Kylie’s yearning for Gideon echoes King’s crowd-pleasing rom-com instincts, while the heavier dramatic work she’s taken on in TV ever since prevents the headstrong character from reading too much like a narrative accessory.
Ultimately, she earns her place in a supernatural finale that — regardless of some contrived mechanics, including the late arrival of a hunky English stranger (Solly McLeod) — mostly lands. Conversely, Williams, despite seeming like an intuitive addition to the Owens coven after “Game of Thrones,” can’t find her footing in an already limited role. A rocky American accent and strangely recessive arc leave Antonia a literal ocean away from most of the conflict, while Kylie jets across the Atlantic leaving her surgeon-in-training sister behind to watch over the limp body of her boyfriend.
Even planted in a stark white room opposite Channing’s feisty-as-ever Frances, Williams’ Antonia routinely seems to disappear. (That said, neither Evan Rachel Wood nor Alexandra Artrip, who were controversially recast as Sally’s daughters in the sequel, could have fixed that imbalance on the page.)
However, that unevenness rarely overwhelms what Bier gets so, so right with “Practical Magic 2.”
Having already directed Bullock through the maternal terror of “Bird Box,” and Kidman through the domestic dramas of “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple,” Bier approaches the Owens sisters’ return with a keen understanding of both stars’ strengths and motivations. That instinct extends to Channing and Wiest, whose kooky reprisals could have amounted to a pair of glorified cameos here. Instead, Bier recognizes the pure joy of seeing these women drinking margaritas again, resulting in a vivid and sweet celebration that gradually reframes aging as a process of gaining power rather than losing it.
That may explain why “Practical Magic 2” succeeds where so many other legacy sequels tend to feel superfluous. These revivals can be enchanting, and even quietly revolutionary, when they exist not to overextend an already popular piece of Hollywood IP — but to acknowledge that a niche audience has kept something special alive precisely because it was always valuable and deserves recognition.
“Practical Magic” didn’t need to be a blockbuster in 1998 to be worth resurrecting now. Fans likely would have kept returning to the Owens’ iconic house every October, whether or not Hollywood ever came knocking again. And yet, during one of the tearjerker sequel’s most devastating moments, Wiest’s Jet delivers a simple suggestion worth heeding in 2026: “Live a little. Live a lot.”
When it comes to conjuring the Owens back on the big screen, Bullock and Kidman have already done the hard part. So, live a little! And let yourself fall for “Practical Magic” like you’ve never been hurt before.
Grade: B+
Warner Bros. will release “Practical Magic 2” in theaters on Friday, September 10.
