The article analyzes major linguistic and pragmatic properties of utterances that native Russian speakers classify as ‘zamechanie’ (roughly, critical remark). The purpose of the research is twofold: firstly, to answer the question whether ‘zamechanie’ can be seen as a speech genre and, secondly, to determine its position on the “politeness – anti-politeness” scale. The analysis is based on the data from the Russian National Corpus and recordings of oral speech collected by the author.