The Palme d'Or is cinema's most prestigious prize. Not the Oscar - that's a popularity contest with better dresses. The Palme is the one that actual filmmakers covet, the award that says your work has been judged the best by a jury of peers at the most important film festival on Earth. It has crowned masterpieces: Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction, The Piano, Parasite.

It has also, on more occasions than Cannes would like to admit, completely bollocksed it up.

The Palme d'Or jury changes every year, which means the award's quality control is about as consistent as British weather. Some years produce unimpeachable choices. Other years produce selections so baffling that you wonder whether the jury watched the same festival as everyone else. Here are the films that deserved the top prize and didn't get it.

2001: Mulholland Drive (Lost to The Son's Room)

David Lynch's hallucinatory noir masterpiece competed at Cannes in 2001 and was the overwhelming critical favourite. It won Lynch the Best Director prize - a consolation that must have felt like being told "you made the best film, but we're giving the award to someone else." The Son's Room, Nanni Moretti's quiet Italian drama about grief, is a perfectly respectable film. Nobody remembers it. Mulholland Drive is regularly cited as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

Lynch's film is a labyrinthine puzzle about identity, Hollywood, and the dreams that consume us. Naomi Watts delivers a dual performance so astonishing it should have won her every award in existence. The Club Silencio scene alone - "No hay banda! There is no band!" - is worth more than most entire films. The jury chose warmth over brilliance, and cinema history has been quietly correcting them ever since.

2013: Inside Llewyn Davis (Lost to Blue Is the Warmest Colour)

The Coen Brothers' melancholic masterpiece about a folk singer going nowhere in 1960s Greenwich Village is one of their finest films - which, given their filmography, is an extraordinary statement. Oscar Isaac, then relatively unknown, delivered a performance of such weary, stubborn beauty that it launched him into stardom. The film is circular, defeatist, funny, and heartbreaking. It's a film about failure that succeeds at everything.

It lost to Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche's three-hour romantic drama that was immediately engulfed in controversy - the lead actresses publicly criticised the director's methods, particularly regarding the extended sex scenes. The film is undeniably powerful, but giving it the Palme while Inside Llewyn Davis sat in the audience feels like a jury choosing spectacle over soul.

2015: Carol (Lost to Dheepan)

Todd Haynes' gorgeous period romance between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara was the critical darling of Cannes 2015. Mara won Best Actress. The film was showered with praise. And then the Palme went to Dheepan, Jacques Audiard's drama about Sri Lankan refugees in Paris, which is a good film that almost nobody talks about ten years later.

Carol is a masterwork of restraint. Every glance, every silence, every carefully chosen frame of Carter Burwell's score says what the characters cannot. Blanchett and Mara generate more erotic tension in a single look across a department store counter than most films manage in their entire runtime. It's a film about desire as a revolutionary act, and it deserved the top prize. The fact that it didn't even receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination the following year compounds the injustice.

1994: Pulp Fiction (Actually Won - But Stay With Me)

Alright, Pulp Fiction did win the Palme. But it shared the festival with Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Red, which was the final film of one of cinema's greatest trilogies and the last film of one of cinema's greatest directors (Kieślowski died two years later). Red is a film of such structural elegance and emotional depth that giving the Palme to Tarantino's brilliantly entertaining but comparatively shallow crime anthology feels, in retrospect, like rewarding flash over substance.

This is the rare case where the "snub" is debatable. Both films are masterpieces. But Red has aged like fine wine, while Pulp Fiction - as influential as it remains - has spawned so many imitators that its originality is harder to appreciate. Kieślowski deserved a Palme. He never got one. That stings.

2003: Elephant (Won - But Dogville Didn't)

Gus Van Sant's Elephant won the Palme in 2003, and it's a fine, unsettling film about a Columbine-inspired school shooting. But competing that year was Lars von Trier's Dogville, a three-hour chamber piece performed on a bare stage with chalk outlines instead of sets, starring Nicole Kidman as a fugitive exploited by a small American town. It's von Trier at his most provocative and formally daring - a film that strips cinema down to its absolute essentials and asks whether what remains is enough.

It is. Dogville is furious, uncomfortable, and impossible to forget. Von Trier has never won the Palme, which is one of the festival's most conspicuous omissions. The man is maddening, often reprehensible in his public statements, and undeniably one of the most important European filmmakers of the past three decades. Dogville was his best shot, and the jury blinked.

2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Lost to Parasite)

Right, this one's tricky because Parasite is a perfect film and completely deserved its Palme. Bong Joon-ho made something so formally brilliant and thematically rich that arguing against it feels insane. But Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire was also competing that year, and it's a film of such exquisite, devastating beauty that it deserved to win at any other festival in any other year.

Sciamma's 18th-century romance between a painter and her subject is cinema at its most sensual - every frame composed like the paintings within it, every silence charged with meaning. The final shot, of Adèle Haenel listening to Vivaldi while her face cycles through every emotion a human is capable of, is one of the greatest single shots in film history. Portrait didn't lose to a lesser film. It lost to a once-in-a-generation film. But in a world with any justice, they'd both have won.

2006: Pan's Labyrinth (Lost to The Wind That Shakes the Barley)

Guillermo del Toro's dark fairy tale set against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain is one of the most imaginative films of the century. It's a film that uses fantasy not as escapism but as survival - a child retreating into myth to endure the horrors of fascism. The Pale Man, the Faun, the labyrinth itself - del Toro's imagery is indelible.

Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley is an excellent film about the Irish War of Independence. It's also Ken Loach doing what Ken Loach does, which he's been doing brilliantly for decades. Giving him the Palme was a lifetime achievement award disguised as a competition result. Del Toro's film was more original, more ambitious, and more likely to endure. History has proven this out - Pan's Labyrinth is a modern classic. Loach's film is a very good Ken Loach film.

The Cannes Conundrum

The Palme d'Or's inconsistency is, paradoxically, part of its value. Unlike the Oscars, which are voted on by thousands of Academy members and tend toward consensus, the Palme is decided by a small jury that changes annually. This means the award can be bold, surprising, even iconoclastic. It also means it can be wrong - spectacularly, indefensibly wrong.

But that's the deal with any jury prize: you accept the subjectivity in exchange for the possibility of genuine surprise. The Oscars will always play it safe. The Palme doesn't have to. And when it swings for the fences - Parasite, The Tree of Life, Amour - it connects in a way no other award can match.

The films on this list didn't need the Palme to prove their greatness. They've done that on their own terms. But they deserved it. And in the private cinema of our imaginations, they won.

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