You can find a long (>4 pgs) review + interviews in today's
NY Times (free online registration).

The Godfather is mentioned several times. Here's a short extract :

RICK LYMAN With a movie like "Road to Perdition," which comes out of one of the venerable Hollywood genres, the gangster film, how do you approach it to make sure it's fresh?

SAM MENDES That's me then, is it? Well, I think that you've got to have a story that isn't a conventional gangster story for a start. But in my case I just try and give the lie to some of the received notions about gangsters. You decide early on that you're not going to have the spats and the pinstriped suits and the fedoras and the gum chewing and the toothpick in the side of the mouth and the flipping coins and all of those things.

At the same time, you don't think, "I can't do that because someone else already did it." You do it because it's what suits the material. You take your cue from the material. Does that make sense?

TOM HANKS Yeah, I think so. Let's face it, the gangster genre has become the stuff of parody. I was trying to think of my cultural references — other than "The Godfather," which isn't really fair to say, because it's to the crime world what "Citizen Kane" is to the newspaper world — and the top references I came up with were an old Carol Burnett sketch with Harvey Korman and that episode on "Star Trek" where Kirk and Spock go down to the gangster planet.

MENDES I've seen that.

HANKS So that you almost have to look at it and say, well, if you take out all the iconographic images of the bootleggers and the cars and the machine guns, can the genre really stand on its own anymore?

LYMAN The use of language in the film is different from most gangster films. There is none of the wise-guy patter one associates with the genre.

MENDES I felt the story held its meaning in the images and in the silences between the characters. So that leads you toward a more spare kind of dialogue and away from the kind of noirish, fast-talking gangster speak. I think the thing most often said to me by both of these gentlemen was, do we really need to say this? Isn't this already clear? Because you want the audience to lean into the film for the first 30 or 40 minutes, not lean back. You want to lead them with clues. You want a mystery.

"Come heavy or not at all." Uncle Junior to Tony S.
"Nenti dire ca nenti si capi" come disse quello. (Say nthg when U know nthg.)
"Chi non ci vuole stare, se ne vada." (If U don't like it here, go somewhere else.)