Practical Magic (1998)

Practical Magic arrived in 1998 to a critical drubbing and a respectable $94 million worldwide, then spent the following decades quietly accruing a cult. The tone wobbles between romantic comedy, domestic horror, and something like a wine commercial shot at golden hour. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play the Owens sisters, raised by aunts in a Massachusetts town that treats their lineage as a tourist attraction and a curse in equal measure. The film is based on Alice Hoffman's novel and opened at number one, facts that its detractors and its devotees both tend to forget.

The gender politics are the point, and they are woven into the plot instead of announced from a pulpit. A matriarchal bloodline, a sisterhood sealed by a childhood blood oath, an abusive boyfriend whose spirit must be expelled by a convened coven of local women: the movie builds its case for female solidarity through incident and imagery. It rarely stops to explain itself, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. The empowerment is structural, not spoken.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with two movie stars and two venerable character actresses carrying a town that offers no racial texture whatsoever. There is no engagement with queerness, economic grievance, climate, body image, or neurodiversity. The witch trials invoked in the backstory are fantasy furniture, not historical argument. What remains is a modest, uneven film that treats female kinship as its engine and lets the audience draw its own conclusions. The cult following, it seems, came for the atmosphere and stayed for the sisters.