Metacritic reviews

Touching, important, and surprisingly inspiring, this movie is a testament to the power of dialect and how it shapes our worldview and fuses and unites us. Willingness to dive in deep past surface level schisms broadens the range of our accepted capabilities and ambitions. Morales may be working with bare bones in her first feature, but she manages to say a lot with a little.

Poignant, funny, and emotionally resonant, Language Lessons organically develops a heartfelt friendship while its cast exudes warmth and charisma.

Morales and Duplass are both appealing enough that their charm shines through in even this seemingly limited format, and the result is an intimate feature that earns that closeness through every stilted video message and free-flowing video conference.

Language Lessons, which comes from the Duplass Brothers indie production stable, is a small-scale debut but one graced with charm and genuine heart.

Films explicitly about the formation of friendships are rare, and Morales and Duplass have fashioned rather a perceptive one, adapting the push-pull dynamics of a romantic comedy to more delicate psychological terrain.

This film shows us that it is okay. We can survive. We can even thrive, and certainly, we can get by with a little help from our friends.

Language Lessons is often likable thanks to its small cast and improvisational nature which delivers beyond the kind of Zooom table reads that nonprofits were offering as pandemic fundraisers throughout the last year. However, in terms of its cinematic value, it never quite transcends, feeling like a film that’s necessary in the moment without exploring the impact of the pandemic head-on.

Unfortunately, Zoom movies do not really benefit anyone, Morales or otherwise (but hopefully this means, she gets another opportunity to do it for “real” out in the world). Duplass’ Spanish is good (a nice plus), and the movie’s intentions are in the right place; it’s warm, warm-hearted, and even mildly bittersweet, but in short, no more Zoom movies, please, and thanks.

Had the film trusted its self-imposed minimalism a little more, it might have been a lot more successful as a character study.

One of the most astute aspects of Morales and Duplass’ script is how it captures the twists and turns of a new friendship that is buoyed by excitement and yet remains tentative, and how it navigates the constant shifts that come with both fresh and established relationships.