When you’re a wife and working mother, there’s this inescapable, self-imposed pressure to do everything right all the time. The idea of having it all — a great job and a loving family, a toned body and a sane mind — is as appealing as it is elusive. Douglas McGrath’s comedy, based on the best-selling novel of the same name, gets that dynamic, that incessant juggling act, and the ways in which we self-flagellate in trying to perfect it. This is not exactly a new concept but it’s increasingly prevalent, and McGrath finds just the right tone in depicting that. Sometimes. Too often, though, he smothers those nuggets of insight with a jaunty, sitcommy tone, with gags that are telegraphed from a mile away and music that works awfully hard to cue our emotional responses. It doesn’t help that Sarah Jessica Parker, as the film’s star, chimes in early and often with voiceovers that sound exactly like the kinds of observations she used to make as Carrie on “Sex and the City,” the role with which she will be eternally, intrinsically tied. Here, she stars as Kate Reddy, a mother of two with her architect husband (Greg Kinnear). She struggles to balance her home life with her demanding job as an investment manager, which gets more time-consuming when she takes on a big project with the firm’s head honcho (Pierce Brosnan). PG-13 for adult situations and language. 91 minutes.

GRADE: * * 1/2 (out of 5).Christy Lemire,The Associated Press

‘Straw Dogs’The setting has been moved from the British countryside to the swamps of Mississippi, and the lead actors got better looking, but Rod Lurie’s film is essentially identical to the 1971 Sam Peckinpah thriller he’s remaking. Names, graphic details, bits of dialogue, even a parallel editing structure that unfolds during a pivotal moment — they’re all here. And the themes and messages that were problematic in the original exist here as well. It’s a movie that purports itself to be an indictment of violence, a critical exploration of the depraved depths to which man can sink when pushed. Yet Lurie (“The Contender,” “Nothing But the Truth”), as writer and director, depicts this brutality in vivid, glorious detail, to the point of almost fetishizing it. Similarly, James Marsden’s character — a mild-mannered, Harvard-educated screenwriter — only truly gains the respect of his disdainful attackers, and only finds his own sense of self-worth, once he unleashes the primal fury he never knew he had inside of him in order to protect his wife and their home. Marsden and Kate Bosworth co-star as a husband and wife who return to her family’s farm after her father’s death. Alexander Skarsgard, as her lustful ex-boyfriend, leads the pack of surly locals who make their lives increasingly difficult. R for strong, brutal violence including a sexual attack, menace, some sexual content and pervasive language. 109 minutes.

GRADE: * * 1/2 (out of 5).Christy Lemire,The Associated Press