American film critic J. Hoberman wrote that Three Sisters, is a "magnificent 2012 portrait of young children in a subsistence-level village in Yunnan province, largely fending for themselves after their father has gone to the city to work", and that the documentary is filmed in "a poverty-stricken environment ... but rather than an exposé of poverty, Three Sisters is about the lived experience of the girls existence".

[2] Jay Weissberg of Variety Magazine praised the film, stating it is "an unquestionably eye-opening, deeply human, strikingly lensed look at an impoverished family whose rudimentary living conditions are a sharp riposte to the illusion of China's economic boom".

[3] Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The New York Times that the film "documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country's unfortunates never seems to wane".

[4] In his three out of four star review for Slant Magazine, Chris Cabin opined that Wang's "no-frills style of documentation visually echoes the preadolescent trio's simple yet unforgiving world and its sense of labor as life".

Wang's style of documentary is based around experience, not storytelling; he wants the spectator to feel like they have spent the film’s running time living alongside its subjects".