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". 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". 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". 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".
Steve Erickson stated that Bing's
Three Sisters "shows the China left behind in its economic explosion ... and the director's "work challenges the dominant, triumphal narrative about China’s economic rise by focusing on people still damaged by communism and left behind by capitalism". Erickson also noted that while the film is "Wang's most accessible film so far, it’s still challenging. 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". ==See also==