The film stars Ian Hart, Shirley Henderson, Kika Markham, Gina McKee, Molly Parker, Jack Shepherd, John Simm, Stuart Townsend, Enzo Cilenti, and Sarah-Jane Potts.

Wonderland had its world premiere at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival on 13 May 1999,[2] and was released in the United Kingdom on 14 January 2000, by Universal Pictures.

The film follows the lives of three London sisters and their family over five days, a long Guy Fawkes Night weekend in November.

[3][4] Waitress Nadia, "shy, with a backpack and her hair in girlish twists",[3] spends all her time going on blind dates with unsatisfactory men from personal ads, while her hairdresser sister Debbie struggles to raise her 11-year-old son without much help from his irresponsible father.

[7] Time lapse photography is used to give moments of accelerated motion as the characters are followed,[3][5] which Winterbottom said was inspired by Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express and gave an impressionistic feeling,[6] "a rush of poignant colours and noise",[4] and other footage is filmed on grainy hand-held 16mm cameras, giving a realist "fly-on-the-wall" feeling.

[5] The scenes where Dan takes his son to a football match were filmed at Selhurst Park, the ground of Crystal Palace in a 1–1 draw against Birmingham City on 6 February 1999.

[9] The New York Times compared the score to that of Stewart Copeland for Rumble Fish and said that "the rhythms are like a clock ticking"[3] and it is "alternately plaintive and mournful".

[10] In contrast, his colleague Lisa Schwarzbaum gave the film a C, opining that while she liked Winterbottom's "loose, improvisatory feel", "the energy is sapped by clinging condescension in the guise of compassionate liberalism".

"[7] The New Statesman wrote in 2016 that the film "far exceeds anything made during the kitchen-sink period in the breadth of its humanism and the range of its social portraiture, and deserves to be recognised as one of the great achievements of British cinema.