The best Dana Ivey’s drama movies

Aibileen Clark is a middle-aged African-American maid who has spent her life raising white children and has recently lost her only son; Minny Jackson is an African-American maid who has often offended her employers despite her family's struggles with money and her desperate need for jobs; and Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan is a young white woman who has recently moved back home after graduating college to find out her childhood maid has mysteriously disappeared. These three stories intertwine to explain how life in Jackson, Mississippi revolves around "the help"; yet they are always kept at a certain distance because of racial lines.

Desperate to find his dad Sam a date, a young boy calls into a radio show and catches the attention of Annie, a journalist who wants to meet Sam atop the Empire State Building.

Shaun Brumder is a local surfer kid from Orange County who dreams of going to Stanford to become a writer and to get away from his dysfunctional family household. Except Shaun runs into one complication after another, starting when his application is rejected after his dim-witted guidance counselor sends in the wrong form.

An epic tale spanning forty years in the life of Celie, an African-American woman living in the South who survives incredible abuse and bigotry. After Celie's abusive father marries her off to the equally debasing 'Mister' Albert Johnson, things go from bad to worse, leaving Celie to find companionship anywhere she can. She perseveres, holding on to her dream of one day being reunited with her sister in Africa.

Marion is a woman who has learned to shield herself from her emotions. She rents an apartment to work undisturbed on her new book, but by some acoustic anomaly she can hear all that is said in the next apartment in which a psychiatrist holds his office. When she hears a young woman tell that she finds it harder and harder to bear her life, Marion starts to reflect on her own life. After a series of events she comes to understand how her unemotional attitude towards the people around her affected them and herself.

Rachel is a food writer at a New York magazine who meets Washington columnist Mark at a wedding and ends up falling in love with him despite her reservations about marriage. They buy a house, have a daughter, and Rachel thinks they are living happily ever after until she discovers that Mark is having an affair while she is waddling around with a second pregnancy.

Simon Birch and Joe Wenteworth are boys who have a reputation for being oddballs. Joe never knew his father, and his mother, Rebecca, is keeping her lips sealed no matter how much he protests. Simon, meanwhile, is an 11-year-old dwarf whose outsize personality belies his small stature. Indeed, he often assails the local reverend with thorny theological questions and joins Joe on his quest to find his biological father.

Set in puritanical Boston in the mid 1600s, the story of seamstress Hester Prynne, who is outcast after she becomes pregnant by a respected reverend. She refuses to divulge the name of the father, is "convicted" of adultery and forced to wear a scarlet "A" until an Indian attack unites the Puritans and leads to a reevaluation of their laws and morals.

Before a criminal lawyer knows what has happened, she is forced to defend a wife killer she knows is guilty.

In the small town of Mumford, a psychologist of the same name moves in and quickly becomes very popular, despite a questionable past.

A runaway couple go on an unforgettable journey from Boston to Key West, recapturing their passion for life and their love for each other on a road trip that provides revelation and surprise right up to the very end.

Nora Wilder (Parker Posey), a single, career woman works at a Manhattan boutique hotel where her excellent skills in guest relations lack in the romantic department. If it is not her loving and dominant mother (Gena Rowlands) attempting to set her up that consistently fail, she has her friend’s (Drea de Matteo) disastrous blind dates to rely on as a backup for further dismay. She's surrounded by friends who are all happily engaged or romantically involved and somehow, love escapes Nora -- until she meets an unusual Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) who helps her discover life beyond her self-imposed boundaries.

Mischievous Huck Finn is unnerved when his father, reemerging after years away, kidnaps him in an attempt to take away a $600 inheritance from his late mother. Fearing for his life, Huck fakes his own death and escapes. He soon runs into his friend, Jim, a slave fleeing his master. Together, the pair embarks on a raft journey down the Mississippi River, staying ahead of pursuers who blame the slave for Huck's alleged murder.

Substance-addicted Hollywood actress, Suzanne Vale is on the skids. After a spell at a detox centre her film company insists as a condition of continuing to employ her that she live with her mother, herself once a star and now a champion drinker. Such a set-up is bad news for Suzanne who has struggled for years to get out of her mother's shadow, and who still treats her like a child. Despite these and other problems, Suzanne begins to see the funny side of her situation, and also realises that not only do daughters have mothers—mothers do too.

Muhammad Ali’s historic Supreme Court battle from behind closed doors. When Ali was drafted into the Vietnam War at the height of his boxing career, his claim to conscientious objector status led to a controversial legal battle that rattled the U.S. judicial system right up to the highest court in the land.

In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing a a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince school teacher go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.

The film follows the life of Mattie Rigsbee (Ellen Burstyn), an elderly woman who believes in strong religious convictions. The film explores the lonely qualities of life for senior citizens after their children leave as adults. Judge Reinhold and Gail O'Grady play Mattie's children who live in a deep southern town. Mattie soon finds a likable friend in the local dogcatcher, Lamar Benfield (Mark Hamill). It is through this relationship in which she meets the dogcatcher's nephew, a troubled, foul-mouthed, orphaned juvenile delinquent, Wesley (Jonathan Taylor Thomas), currently serving time in juvenile detention for a recent car theft. Mattie finds that this young man is just missing direction and believes that with a little insight on Christianity he can straighten up and fly right.

Jan, an itinerant male nurse from Denmark, takes a new job with Mrs. A, a terminally ill Manhattan woman raising her parentless thirteen-year-old grandson, Gil. Spending the summer by the shore, the emotionally reserved Jan finds himself oddly cast as a mentor to Gil in having to prepare the sensitive boy for life with his cousins in Florida after his grandmother's death.