'Language Lessons' Review: Natalie Morales Directs a Platonic Romcom For the Zoom Era 'Language Lessons' Review: Natalie Morales Directs a Platonic Romcom For the Zoom Era Morales teams up with co-writer and co-star Mark Duplass for a friendship study that connects to the age of quarantine, even if it's not expressly about it. Guy Lodge, provided by FacebookTwitterEmail Running time: Running time: 91 MIN. Courtesy of ICM It’s nearly a year since Zoom became a household name brand, its boxy chat windows, variable resolution and capacity for technical glitches shaping how many communicated with friends, family and colleagues during a global pandemic — to the extent that “Zoom fatigue” is now the defining buzz term of 2021 so far. A gentle relationship study playing out entirely through the cramped, sterile rectangles of a virtual chat app, actor-director Natalie Morales’ freshman feature “Language Lessons” arrives just as our collective patience for such correspondence is worn threadbare, though it doesn’t romanticize the medium. Rather, this tender, slender story of a queer California widower (Mark Duplass) processing his grief through online Spanish classes with a Costa Rican stranger (Morales) ebbs and flows with the limitations, miscommunications and occasional candor of screen-based interaction.