Three young people-two men and a woman-break into a music store to steal instruments for their band and get caught in the act by the owner; in a sudden surge of panic, hubris, and pure synaptic frenzy, they murder him. The rest of the film carefully maps their drift away from each other, their bandmates (some of whom guess the truth, some of whom don't know), and their own core personalities. The band...backs away from recognition and dissolves with painful slowness. Everyone ends in either confusion, capitulation, or suicide, and betrayal is the constant along the way....Assayas blends the guilty and the innocent together so thoroughly that the distinction hardly seems to matter. The murder serves as a maximal metaphor for any leap into the unknown taken by a young person, who then doubles back into the familiar after the shock of recognition.-Kent Jones, "Tangled Up in Blue: The Cinema of Olivier Assayas," Film Comment, Jan-Feb '96