Why We Still Need Practical Magic

Some films stay lodged in female memory in ways that have very little to do with whether they were critically acclaimed, structurally perfect, or even particularly successful when they first appeared. Women keep them alive because of the feeling they create - a feeling tied to a room, a season, a version of ourselves, or a type of longing we do not often see reflected back at us. Practical Magic has belonged to that category for nearly three decades. Women have continued watching it through breakups, lonely apartments, stressful autumns, friendships, divorces, kitchen wine nights, and those periods of life when reality has become so aggressively practical that anything mystical feels like oxygen.