Practical Magic 2: Mark Kermode stirs the cauldron, the critics stir the drink (film news).
If the embed above has been hexed, cursed or quietly set to private, you can watch Mark Kermode’s review here: Mark Kermode reviews Practical Magic 2 (Kermode and Mayo’s Take, YouTube).
The Good Doctor has spoken, and as ever he has done the decent thing: sat through the film on our behalf, thought about it properly, and then explained himself in complete sentences with actual reasoning attached. Mark Kermode has been doing this for so long that he now qualifies as a load-bearing structure of British film criticism, and whatever your view of Practical Magic 2, his review above is worth ten minutes of your life. Go on. We’ll wait. The rest of this piece will still be here, smelling faintly of cloves.
Back? Good. Because Practical Magic 2 lands in UK and Irish cinemas today, 11th September 2026, and the critical reception has been roughly what you’d expect if you invited a coven to a wine tasting and then served them supermarket own-brand Merlot.
The premise, for those who have spent the last thirty years not watching Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman light candles, is this. Twenty-five years on from the original, the Owens family curse is still doing what curses do, which is killing off the men and generating excellent production design. Sally, widowed for a second time, has done the sensible maternal thing and cast a spell to make her daughters forget they’re witches. This works about as well as every other spell ever cast in this franchise. When Kylie’s boyfriend has the audacity to fall into a coma shortly after she tells him she loves him, the whole enchanted house of cards comes down, and the family decamps from coastal Massachusetts to England in search of something called the Book of Ravens, because ancient curses are never conveniently filed in the local library.
Susanne Bier directs, which is a genuinely interesting choice on paper. The screenplay comes from Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel, and draws on Alice Hoffman’s 2021 novel The Book of Magic. Bullock and Kidman return as Sally and Gillian, with Joey King and Maisie Williams as the next generation, Lee Pace as a witchcraft academic who is clearly not going to be left alone by the plot, Xolo Maridueña as a young man with poor survival odds, and Solly McLeod as a dark warlock named Thomas Lockland, which is exactly the sort of name that should come with a warning label. Best of all, Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing are back as aunts Jet and Frances, still radiating the serene menace of two women who have buried several husbands and won’t be lectured about it.
Much of the film was shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, with location work in Devon and London, meaning the Owens curse was substantially resolved within the M25. The famous house has been rebuilt for nostalgia purposes. The midnight margaritas return. Stevie Nicks is on the soundtrack, because of course she is; at this point it would be legally actionable if she weren’t. Runtime is 130 minutes, certificate 12A.
And the critics? Reader, the critics have splattered it. The film currently sits at 36% on Rotten Tomatoes across 89 reviews, with a Metacritic score hovering in the mid-forties. RogerEbert.com called it “a listless, wholly unneeded piece of IP exploitation” and signed off by suggesting that maybe in 2054 somebody will finally work out the right spell to make magic out of one of these films, which is the sort of line you write when you’ve given up hope but still have a word count to hit. The Associated Press was gentler, awarding two stars out of four and landing on the most persuasive criticism of the lot: that the sequel trades the original’s daft, cackling whimsy for a genuinely spooky undertone that doesn’t quite fit. Take away the silliness and the darkness has nothing to bounce off. It just sits there, being dark, like a scented candle nobody lit.
Where there is praise, it’s specific rather than general. Lee Pace comes out of it best, apparently generating actual chemistry with Bullock, which is more than the script seems to manage on its own. Joey King acquits herself honourably. The aunts remain undefeated. And several reviewers noted, with the weary tone of people who have been here before, that Bullock and Kidman are playing precisely the same beats they played in 1998, twenty-five years of alleged character growth having been quietly hexed out of existence.
None of which will matter one jot at the box office. Tracking has the film opening somewhere north of $40 million domestically and $58 to $63 million globally, which for a mid-budget autumn fantasy is a perfectly respectable haul. Practical Magic 2 is what the industry politely calls critic-proof. The original was also panned on release and then spent the next three decades quietly colonising the nation’s DVD shelves, Halloween rewatch traditions and, more recently, an entire TikTok aesthetic. If you are the sort of person who owns more than one apothecary jar, the Rotten Tomatoes score was never going to be the deciding factor.
Which leaves us, as ever, somewhere between the critics and the congregation. Our own view of the 1998 film was that it pulled in too many directions at once, and the reviews suggest the sequel has inherited that trait along with the curse and the wallpaper. But there is something faintly magnificent about a franchise that has now been told twice, by practically everybody, that it isn’t very good, and has responded both times by selling out cinemas full of people in velvet.
Listen to Kermode. Then go anyway, if that’s your thing. We’re not judging. We’re just saying that if a man in a bowling shirt has taken the trouble to work out exactly what this film is and isn’t doing, the least you can do is hear him out before mixing the margaritas.
Practical Magic 2 is in UK and Irish cinemas now from Warner Bros. Pictures, certificate 12A, running time 130 minutes.
