A piece of art serves as a tool of self-realization as well as a means of indirect communication. One of the functions of reviews is to help attract the reader’s attention to the work by analyzing it on the basis of certain criteria. Reviewers can assume three roles: that of a reporter, an analyst and a sideline observer. The key aims of the review seem to differ in various periods as this genre is developing with regard to certain conditions that the society experiences. The pilot study allows making an assumption that modern reviews will be different from the ones found in the Soviet period. The findings of the present qualitative research give evidence that contemporary critique is more frequently seen as sharing one’s impressions and interpretations rather than evaluating and analyzing the work thoroughly and that the prevailing types of modality in reviews of the above-mentioned periods seem to differ from deontic one that mainly serves to point out the established norms to epistemic modality that allows to reveal reviewer’s personal opinion and alethic modality that enables to give advice how to improve the work without imposing one’s subjective attitude to the society.