At once a throwback to Blaxploitation and a work of paranoid science fiction, They Cloned Tyrone is an imaginative and deliriously entertaining conspiracy thriller. Its director, Juel Taylor, has made a film that unfolds with patience, telling a story that, today, seems destined for Netflix’s overcrowded servers. It’s too idiosyncratic to earn a wide release in theaters, where the average moviegoer refuses to take risks on anything that doesn’t look prepackaged to the specifications of mass consumption. So it’s doomed to the streaming wasteland, where only word of mouth might earn its place on the coveted “Top 10 Movies in the U.S. Today” slider. That it was made at all seems like a triumph. Along with similarly out-there and socially conscious genre experimentations by Black filmmakers—ranging from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2018) to Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) to Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall (2021)—Taylor’s film has many antecedents but adopts a tone that feels wholly innovative. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before, even though it reminds you of some of your favorite movies.

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