Films up for awards are part of a full cinema lineup

Wim Wender's The End of Violence stars Andie MacDowell and will be shown at Cornell Cinema March 13 and 15.

If you've been a stranger to Cornell Cinema, spring break, this coming week, may be an excellent time to get acquainted. Seats will be plentiful and so will parking spaces. Admission to all films is $4.50; $4 for students and kids under 12. All screenings are in Willard Straight Theatre.

Three films currently up for the Independent Spirit Awards will grace the Cornell Cinema screen during the break:

The End of Violence, with Andie MacDowell and Bill Pullman, is an intoxicating look at the interrelatedness of technology, culture, the power of images and the notion of violence itself. Acclaimed by The New York Times as one of director Wim Wenders "most memorable works," the film will be shown March 13 at 9:30 p.m. and March 15 at 7:30 p.m.

Critical Care, director Sidney Lumet's biting satire of the medical industry, with James Spader, Albert Brooks and Kyra Sedgwick, is a morality play of doctors, patients, greedy heirs-to-be and the devil himself. It will be shown tonight at l0 p.m., March 14 at 9:30 p.m. and March 16 at 7:30 p.m.

Nénette et Boni is a story set in Marseilles of a brother and a sister trying to come to terms with each other and their uncertain futures. The Village Voice wrote that "those who believe that privileged moments and joie de pizzazz vanished from French movies with the death of Francois Truffaut are hereby invited to ponder [director Claire] Denis's cinema of seductive fragments, [where] the everyday gets a patina of tropical splendor." The film will be shown March 19 at 7:30 p.m., March 21 at 7:15 p.m. and March 23 at 7 p.m.

Also on view at Cornell Cinema will be God's Comedy, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, to be screened today at 6:45 p.m.; and Love Serenade, a 1996 Cannes Film Festival winner, showing March 18 at 7:30 p.m. and March 20 and 24 at 9:30 p.m.

The break week series also includes two unusual documentaries. Fans of the best-selling book A Midwife's Tale will enjoy the intelligent adaptation by director Richard Rogers, March 14 and 17 at 7:30 p.m. The second documentary, Soul in the Hole, set in Brooklyn, is a fast-paced film that's a passionate depiction of street culture, basketball and friendship. "The best film ever made about basketball -- and about growing up black, male and street," wrote The Village Voice. The film will be shown March 20 and 24 at 7:30 p.m.

Intimate Relations, Philip Goodhew's biting look at the hemmed-in nature of British familial relations in the 1950s, concludes the spring break series. Variety heralded the film as a "perfectly realized black comedy about 1950s family dysfunction, English suburb-style." The film will be shown March 21 and 25 at 9:30 p.m., and March 22 at 7:30 p.m.