Beware the hidden powers of the cellphone. When in Never Here New York conceptual artist Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) finds a stranger’s phone, she uses it as the basis for her next art show, tracking down and interviewing the owner’s contacts, listening to his music and using his GPS history to retrace his steps.

You might consider it odd that a man whose wife spends half the year in Hong Kong without him hasn’t managed to get around to catching a plane from Heathrow to visit her in the Far East, but that is the case with Jonah Mulray, the stressed-out protagonist of Strangers. Jonah’s excuse for his marital negligence is that he’s “scared of flying”.

It was always a question of when. As in when would the hoity-toity Home Secretary and her poker-faced bodyguard move into the horizontal? “I’m not the queen, you know,” she said, by way of a hot come-on. “You can touch me.” As a mode of discourse, this marked quite a step-up from the first episode of Jed Mercurio's new drama. Then the Rt Hon Julia Montague didn’t even want his vote. Now she was after her bodyguard’s body. “I Will Always Love You”, anyone?

So far Jon Hamm has had trouble finding himself movie roles which fit him quite as impeccably as Mad Men’s Don Draper – though he could do worse than throw his hat in the ring for James Bond – but his role here as an American diplomat in Beirut plays obligingly to his strengths.

This is the second Mission: Impossible movie written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first time any director has been called back for an encore on the series. He did a smart job on 2015’s Rogue Nation, but this time he has pulled out every stop to deliver an escalating frenzy of action sequences that frequently leave you wondering how the hell they did that.

How well do you know the person you love? Are they someone completely different when you’re not around? This is the central question Eve Myles (main picture) has to answer in the BBC’s latest mystery drama. Faced with the sudden disappearance of her seemingly lovely husband, she must piece together where he’s gone and what she’s been missing.

The world was captivated by the Arab Spring – thousands of citizens rising up in unity against longstanding dictatorships, filling squares and refusing to bow. But for many of us, it was a world away; the crowds were a single organism, thinking and acting as one. What The Nile Hilton Incident does incredibly well is create the feeling of being an individual on those streets: placing you in that simmering cauldron, a city on the edge.

The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it.

The Cannes jury in 2017 gave best actress to Diane Kruger for her performance in In the Fade. She plays Katja, who turns avenging angel when her son and Turkish husband are murdered. It’s Kruger’s first acting role in her native German and she’s on screen for almost the entire film. Whether you are absorbed by the narrative of In the Fade (German title: Aus der Nichts) or find yourself distanced by the stylistic tics and plot holes, probably depends on how much Kruger/Katja convinces you. I kept being reminded of another intelligent, beautiful model turned actress, Jessica Lange, who took on a heavyweight role in Costa-Gavras' courtroom drama, The Music Box. If Kruger could have delivered a similarly nuanced performance, In the Fade might have overcome its somewhat clunky structure.

Director Fatih Akin, the son of Turkish immigrants, lives in Hamburg and has won high praise for previous films such as Head On (2004) and Soul Kitchen (2009) that captured multicultural life in Germany. Here he takes a darker turn, drawing on the recent rise of neo-Nazi terrorism to craft a thriller that turns into a courtroom drama and then an action-revenge movie. In the Fade won him a Golden Globe for best foreign film but has not done that well at the US box office before its release here, timed perhaps as an intelligent women’s film alternative to World Cup season.

We first meet Katja in home movie flashbacks. She’s a bohemian young student, buying drugs from Nuri (played by Numan Acar, best known from season 4 of Homeland). They fall in love and marry while he’s in prison. Cut to the present day and we meet a more respectable couple with a cute six-year-old son and a shared business. They’re running a travel and translation agency from a shop-front office in a Turkish neighbourhood in Hamburg. It’s not the most lucrative of enterprises and makes their very glossy home and top-end BMW a bit baffling. (Pictured below: Diane Kruger and Numan Acar)Turns out their lifestyle’s funded by Nuri’s father’s property empire back in Turkey, but it’s this kind of distracting detail that makes it hard to be absorbed by the main narrative. Instead of working as a device to show how prejudiced the investigating police are – they assume from his lifestyle that Nuri is still a drug-dealer and that his murderers will be from the underworld – the emphasis on luxe production design make it seem as if the filmmakers couldn’t resist floating camerawork around stylish interiors and fast cars, rather than working within the cramped confinement of a real apartment and an everyday motor.

In the Fade was co-written by lawyer Hark Bohm and is partially based on a real-life terrorism case which is yet to be resolved. The courtroom scenes are screenwriting 101: the presentation of gruesome forensic detail, infuriating legal nitpicking and passionate emotional outbursts from Kruger. There’s a particularly ferocious performance by the cadaverous Johannes Krisch as the ruthless defence lawyer. It’s the final section of the film, when it turns into a vigilante revenge movie, which really puts too much burden on Kruger's acting skills and taxes the viewer’s ability to suspend disbelief. While it’s good to get an insight into Germany’s current racial tensions and the film is never boring, In the Fade just doesn’t quite deliver. 

• Read more film reviews on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch the trailer to In the Fade

The journalist Frank Gardner has turned to fiction to illuminate with imagination the world that he knows inside out from years of reporting. His biographical trajectory, from scholar of the Middle East and the Arab world, through BBC correspondent in the region – he was shot by terrorists in Saudi Arabia, which left him confined to a wheelchair – has given rise to a riveting memoir, Blood & Sand, as well as a previous thriller, Crisis.