Would that all of the intimidatingly prolific Michael Winterbottom's work was as effortlessly beguiling as this. Even its best precursors insist on caveats: to excuse the bizarre flights of Butterfly Kiss; to explain how I Want You never amounts to more than its extraordinary visuals; or why the grisly Jude is freighted with more wrist-slashing skill than a half-dozen frown'n'gown epics.

London. We follow the lives of three sisters and their extended family over one weekend. There's Nadia (Gina McKee), a twentysomething waitress picking-up inappropriate men through a telephone dating service. And older sister Debbie (Shirley Henderson), a single mother with an 11-year-old son and feckless ex-husband (Ian Hart). And the heavily pregnant Molly (Molly Parker), whose boyfriend Eddie (John Simm) chooses this Bonfire Night weekend for an early mid-life crisis. Cool Britannia it ain't.

Scripter Laurence Coriat’s canvass is restricted but finds in the comings and goings - few highs, many lows - a surprising number of small truths. Little happens, but sometimes film is too concerned with what happens. Perhaps with Coriat being French the suggestion is all too easy, but Wonderland certainly shares more with modern realist Gallic cinema than anything currently coming out of its homeland. Performances throughout are exemplary.

Stylistically much is owed to the hand-held naturalism of the Dogma-95 tradition, albeit minus the Danes' decidedly dogmatic commandments. What the film gains, though, is a raw cinema-vérité honesty that convincingly captures contemporary London without gloss or sentimentality, albeit with the occasional fanciful flight provided by some judiciously placed time-lapse photography.

It's Michael Nyman's exceptional score, though, that wrongfoots even the most jaundiced viewer. It’s an emollient to Winterbottom's grit, softening the visual grain whilst roughening the composer’s inherent romanticism. Held back for moments of real depth or genuine epiphany, the results - as Nadia sits tearfully on a night bus, or young Jack watches fireworks in the park - are outstanding.

Sublime moments, transcendence in ugliness, Wonderland never puts a foot wrong. Everyone is good and bad and, even if the end isn't conventionally happy, it at least offers the chance of happiness beyond the frame. Easily the best British film since Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies.