One of the key figures in the New York independent film scene of the 1980s, South African–born Oblowitz (Minus Zero, King Blank) shifted coasts (to Los Angeles) and media (as a successful music video director) before returning to feature filmmaking in the late 1990s. This World, Then the Fireworks is his potent adaptation of the Jim Thompson story about a twin brother and sister (Zane and Gershon) who suffer childhood trauma by witnessing a murderous primal scene. With the brother narrating, the story fast-forwards thirty years to the time in which he has become a muckracking reporter and his twin sister a prostitute. For critic David Edelstein, Oblowitz made a “refreshingly unapologetic adaptation . . . that skillfully evokes a novella so compressed that reading it, in the words of the wrier Max Allan Collins, is ‘like drinking a can of frozen orange juice without adding the water.’”