View remote logs?

I've Googled around, and tried some experiments with likely-looking tools like git log, git diff, and git ls-remote, but they only seem to operate on the local repository. In particular, there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to view the commit logs on a remote repository without pulling it first.

On an intuitive level, it seems like "git log origin" would allow me to see what someone has committed to a remote repository so I can decide whether it's something I want to pull. Even something like "git diff HEAD origin" would let me know if there were changes I might want to pull before doing so.

Am I missing something obvious? Is it possible to use the CLI to view remote logs, or is the only choice to pull everything?