Remembering Playland at the Beach

Vintage photographs and film clips are the highlights of Thomas Wyrsch’s nostalgic documentary on Playland at the Beach, the amusement park enthroned on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. Assorted talking heads recount the history and technical specifics of Playland and trot out memories of their own childhood visits. While those talking heads and voice-overs suffer somewhat from a distracting casualness, the evocative glimpses of the past in Wyrsch’s Ken Burns-like visual compilations make for some nifty time travel. The director will be in attendance for Saturday, May 29, showing. Pageant Theatre. Not rated