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Practical Magic is a 1998 American family-fantasy film directed by Griffin Dunne and starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witches who carry on a family legacy of witchcraft and tragedy. The film is based on a book of the same name by Alice Hoffman. The original music score was composed by Alan Silvestri. The rejected score by Michael Nyman also enjoys popularity[citation needed].

The Craft has been passed down through generations to the Owens women. The story concerns sisters Frances (Stockard Channing) and Jet (Dianne Wiest), and their orphaned nieces Gillian (Nicole Kidman) and Sally (Sandra Bullock). The Owens family is cursed: if an Owens woman finds true love with a man, he will die tragically, as was the case with the father of Gillian and Sally, whose death also brought on their mother's death "from a broken heart." The girls move in with the Frances and Jet and the townspeople treat the family as outsiders, for they fear the women are witches. As a child, Sally casts a true love spell to protect her. She dreams up a series of odd traits for the man of her dreams, confident no real man could ever be like the man in her spell, preventing her from ever falling in love.

The sisters grow up, and Gillian runs away as she is impatient with small town life. Packing her bags and leaving at night, they cast a binding oath to each other using blood from both of their hands and then mixing the bloods by clasping hands. Sally becomes lonely without Gillian. Her aunts cast a spell that helps Sally fall in love with a man named Michael. Sally marries him and has two daughters, Kylie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Antonia (Alexandra Artrip). When Michael falls victim to the curse and dies, Sally and her daughters return to the Owens home to live with the aunts. Sally swears off magic because the magical curses have ruined her life, and she tells the aunts that her daughters will not do magic.

When Gillian's latest boyfriend Jimmy (Goran Višnjić) turns abusive, she calls Sally for help. Sally goes to collect Gillian, but Jimmy kidnaps both of them. Sally puts belladonna into Jimmy's tequila to knock him out, but she uses too much and accidentally kills him. The panicked sisters attempt to resurrect him using a forbidden spell from their aunts' book of spells. The spell works but Sally must kill him again when he attempts to throttle Gillian. The sisters bury his body in the Owens home garden, where they hope nobody will notice, but his spirit begins to haunt them. The aunts leave town because they realize Sally and Gillian have done something terrible and the girls must fix what they did.

A State Investigator named Gary Hallett (Aidan Quinn) arrives in town looking for Jimmy. Sally's daughters notice that Gary fulfills a number of Sally's true love spell conditions. Sally confesses that she killed Jimmy, and that she cast a spell to summon Gary to her. Gary has an encounter with Jimmy's ghost, and decides to leave town without arresting Sally.

Jimmy possesses Gillian and the aunts return; they decide that in order to dispel Jimmy, a coven needs to be formed. Sally realizes she must embrace magic to save her sister. She is also forced to ask the aid of townswomen who had feared and excluded her and Gillian. The women come out of curiosity and a desire to help. The exorcism is a success due to the strong bond between the two sisters. Jimmy's spirit is dispelled and the 300-year-old curse of the Owens women is ended when Sally repeats the spell that was mentioned as Gillian first left while clasping their hands to mix each other's blood once more. The spell is lifted and Gillian returns.

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