Prolific British director Michael Winterbottom gets very little credit for his consistently interesting work, perhaps because he's impossible to neatly categorize, capable of switching genres, time periods, and styles and never making the same movie twice. In the last five years alone, he's made a Thomas Hardy costume drama (1996's Jude), a verité political treatment of the Bosnian conflict (1997's Welcome To Sarajevo), and an intimate romantic tragedy set in contemporary times (1998's I Want You). His next feature, Kingdom Come, is another Hardy adaptation (The Mayor Of Casterbridge) but, ever the iconoclast, Winterbottom is retooling it as a revisionist Western. So it should come as no surprise that the well-observed, impeccably acted Wonderland, his foray into the working-class British realism of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, doesn't always play by the rules. Working from a beautifully structured script by Laurence Coriat, Winterbottom refuses to wallow in miserablism and isn't as overtly concerned with social issues as his contemporaries. Instead, he uses the daily trials of a disparate London family as a window into a broader survey of the modern cityscape, shot in colorful (if grainy) Cinemascope and driven by composer Michael Nyman's swirling orchestral score. Wonderland is a complex, multi-character ensemble piece, but one of its chief pleasures is how Coriat and Winterbottom take their time establishing the connections between the characters, heightening the sense of distance they have from each other. Set over a long weekend, the story follows three sisters: The oldest, Shirley Henderson, is a single hairdresser separated from her coarse, irresponsible husband (Ian Hart) and trying to raise their young son on her own; Gina McKee is a sharp-witted café waitress who resorts to the personal ads to meet the right man; and Molly Parker is a pregnant woman whose husband (John Simm) can barely make ends meet with his dead-end job. The source of the family's estrangement is their parents' (Kika Markham and Jack Shepherd) marriage, which seems to have crumbled long ago. Messy, episodic, and thrillingly unpredictable, Wonderland works primarily as a collection of truthful moments, some wrenching and others off-handedly funny. Brief sequences such as Simm privately mustering the courage to relay bad news to his pregnant wife or Hart's harrowing night on the town with his son ring with urgency and touching authenticity. Now working at more than a movie-a-year pace, Winterbottom clearly has a lot of stories to tell, but Wonderland confirms his ability to invest each one with detail and humanity.