The Best of Times is a 1986 American sports comedy-drama film directed by Roger Spottiswoode, written by Ron Shelton and starring Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as two friends attempting to relive a high school football game.

Jack Dundee is a banker obsessed with what he considers the most shameful moment in his life: dropping a perfectly thrown pass in the final seconds of the 1972 high school football game between Taft and their arch rivals, Bakersfield, that ended in a scoreless tie.

The Taft Rockets are losing, 0-26, by the end of the first half of the Taft-Bakersfield rematch game, so Jack enrages Reno by "accidentally" letting him know that it was him who incited the town dressed as the other team's mascot.

Walter Goodman of The New York Times drew attention to the "constrained" plot and uneven script, but was complimentary of Williams's "amiable performance", and relished the rousing ending that "leaves you with the sort of sappy happy feeling that Frank Capra and Preston Sturges used to provide".

[3] In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington gave special praise to the co-stars, Williams and Russell, who he described as "maybe the best thing" about the movie, and excused the "excesses and flaws" of the script.

Calling the film "a lip-smacking tale of all-American wish-fulfillment and a witty satire of its dangers", he commended scenarist, Ron Shelton, as having "a wickedly tight grip on the absurdities and dynamics of small American cities".

[8] Scott Weinberg of eFilmCritic.com wrote, "Forgotten by most yet seemingly adored by those who choose to remember it, The Best of Times stands in my book as one of the truly great sports comedies.