This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

This week's two best movies have one thing in common: Their main characters are on a relentless mission to find their man.

One is Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise's indestructible spy character, who returns for "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation," the fifth installment of the action franchise. This time, Hunt must deal with the disbanding of the IMF, and being hunted by the CIA while he tracks down a vengeful ex-spy (Sean Harris) who is running The Syndicate, a shadowy anti-IMF. Hunt is aided by his returning cohorts — Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner — as he hops from Minsk to Havana to Paris to Vienna to Casablanca to London in pursuit of his target. He's also aided, or hindered, by a disavowed British spy, played by Rebecca Ferguson — who is the movie's big revelation, and an actress deserving of her own action franchise.

The other excellent movie this week is "Tangerine," a micro-budgeted look inside the seedy world of transgender prostitutes on the streets of West Hollywood. Sin-Dee (played by newcomer Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is a fierce hooker just out of jail, and looking for her pimp/boyfriend Chester (James Ransone) — who, she learns, has been unfaithful with a "fish" (a biological female) while Sin-Dee was in the slammer. Writer-director Sean Baker provides an eye-opening and intimate look at a world most of us never see.

"Vacation," which opened Wednesday, is a sequel (not a reboot) of 1983's "National Lampoon's Vacation" that casts Ed Helms as Rusty Griswold, now an adult trying to re-enact the road trip his dad (Chevy Chase) organized to Walley World. The story is scattershot and scatalogical in the extreme, but it's undeniably funny a good deal of the time.

The Tower is serving up a fun documentary for all ages, "A LEGO Brickumentary," which tracks the popularity, history and versatility of the beloved building toy. The movie is most fascinating when it explores the varied ways people use LEGOs — as source of scientific inspiration, as material for fine art, and as a therapy tool for autistic children.

The indie drama "Infinitely Polar Bear" boasts a strong performance by Mark Ruffalo as a manic-depressive dad who must straighten up his act to raise his two daughters (Imogene Wolodarsky and Ashley Aufderheide) while his estranged wife (Zoe Saldana) goes to grad school. The narrative, by writer-director Maya Forbes (and based on her own childhood), has its peaks and valleys, but Ruffalo's portrayal of a bipolar dad is fantastic.

"The Stanford Prison Experiment," an argument-starter at this year's Sundance Film Festival, re-creates a 1971 psychological experiment, in which volunteers were randomly assigned roles as guards and prisoners in a mock prison, to see how they would react to their roles. Billy Crudup stars as the conflicted professor who designed the experiment, and the volunteers are played by a who's who of next-generation talent (Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Thomas Mann, Nicholas Braun, Keir Gilchrist, Ki Hong Lee, Tye Sheridan, Logan Miller, Johnny Simmons and others). The movie rides the line between showing the brutality of the case and exploiting it, and the moralizing final act feels false and tacked on.

Two more movies opening this weekend were not screened for critics: "Batkid Begins," a documentary about how San Franciscans banded together to make a 5-year-old cancer patient's wish come true; and the fantasy "The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet," about a 10-year-old cartographer who strikes out on his own to travel from Montana to Washington, D.C.