Among the many thought-provoking insights provided by Emiliano Morreale's outstanding history of the mafia movie, the observation that ‘the mafia (especially the Sicilian mafia) is still one of the entertainment industry's most sellable commodities in the world, perhaps even more so than the Dolce Vita or Italian cuisine' (p. 8) strikes the reader as an obvious, and yet baffling idea. As nearly every student who has ever taken an Italian cinema course in the Anglophone world knows, the mafia movie has gradually become a staple of what Italian cinema is purported to be, at least according to two generations of critics and scholars. Partly a consequence of the long shadow of The Godfather and its epigones over the image of Italy abroad, the popularity of the Italian mafia movie is arguably a misconstruction. The quantitatively modest production of Italian films and TV shows on Cosa Nostra (16 films, almost all very obscure B-movies, out of the 252 produced in the annus mirabilis of 1973), let alone their limited international circulation, stands in contrast with its alleged centrality to the industry at large.

While some scholars have taken this discrepancy at face value to call for a reconsideration of Italian film history against (or in spite of) the hegemony of impegno to which the mafia movie is perhaps too hastily associated, Morreale instead revisits and expands its history with commendable rigour, demonstrating a salience that goes beyond sheer production outcomes. To do so, La mafia immaginaria reframes the mafia movie through the lens of genre – ‘a critical gesture that establishes a certain standpoint on a film production and its context, creating new relationships between hitherto unrelated titles, genres, and discourses' (p. 33). The theoretical and methodological boldness of such a move could be appreciated when considering what the vernacular Western In nome della legge (1949), the parody film L'onorata società (1961), the poliziottesco Il consigliori (1973), the instant movie Cento giorni a Palermo (1982), the porn movie Concetta Licata (1994), and the trash-TV-show L'onore e il rispetto (2006–17) may have in common besides the self-evident presence of Cosa Nostra.

The book is divided into two sections. Chapters One to Four map out the features of the ‘autonomous and self-referential universe' (p. 4) that is the mafia movie, demonstrating convincingly how the genre, developing in relative isolation from the historical reality of the crime syndicate, has elaborated an image of Cosa Nostra (and, by extension, of Sicily) as both a symptom and a metaphor of broader social contradictions. If this dimension is in no way foreign to the scholarship on the mafia movie, Morreale's specific contribution to it consists in working through the notion of genre in order to consider its industrial nature. It is from that perspective that the genre in question becomes the prism through which the history of Italian cinema and television from the 1950s to the present day can be revisited, registering a series of major shifts in the realm of cultural production from the rise and fall of popular cinema to the changing dynamics of gender relations.

The second and more voluminous section of the book covers the history of the genre in twelve chapters spanning from the foundational In nome della legge to the differently tragic Il traditore (2019) and La mafia non è più quella di una volta (2019). Although individual chapters are devoted to the former as well as to Salvatore Giuliano (1961), the analysis proceeds by establishing family resemblances and affinities between a diverse corpus of films and TV shows. Supported by a rich and thorough research and a vibrant prose, this section reconstructs the complex history of the mafia movie and its articulations in close dialogue with both the Italian media landscape and, more crucially, the political and social history of the country. In doing so, the author proposes a narrative arc progressing from the time when mafia films ‘shall not, could not, or must not be made' (p. 92) to today's appropriation of Cosa Nostra as ‘a world of signs able to mobilise at each time the variants of commemoration, commitment, and conspiracy to secure its hold on the [national] media sphere' (p. 272). The scope and depth of the historical account are truly exceptional: not only does the body of texts examined include little-known works and unrealised projects, but the analysis itself also presents countless enlightening intuitions that would not surprise those familiar with Morreale's film criticism. The elegant balance of formal, thematic, narrative, and industrial analysis, perhaps the main strength of La mafia immaginaria, bestows a cultural density to the mafia movie that makes the volume of interest to a readership extending far beyond mafia and media studies. As the ambitious challenge of providing the definitive history of the genre could be considered successfully met, the need to understand its social effects, somehow belittled by the book's insistence on the self-referential nature of the mafia movie, will orient research to come.