Weaving personal narrative and thought-provoking interviews with leading adventurers, family, friends and academics, Magnetic Mountains explores dangerous psychological ground in the aftermath of the director's near-fatal accident climbing in the Alps as he reflects on the hidden costs of his passion for the mountains.

Paul Diffley's first DVD release since Dave Brown left to form Bamboo Chicken is a mixed bag of four short films which aren't all successful. Single-Handed, which won two awards at the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival, tells the story of Kev Shields climbing E6 despite his disability. Slate Monkeys is a fun-enough look at slate climbing and the eccentricities of Johnny Dawes through the eyes of American Matt Segal. Hey Presto features Canadian Sonnie Trotter making a trad ascent of a sport route at Squamish, while Little Big Wall is a rather hurried expedition report from Madagascar.

Playful, inspiring and bloody cold, North of the Sun tells the story of two resourceful Norwegians who take sustainability to new extremes as they surf a beach in northern Norway during the depths of winter and then clean it up.

In days of yore, when Jerry Moffatt was a young man, climbing magazines published state-of-the-art articles that told you where and what the hardest routes were. Now we have Big Up Productions. Progression is a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-top run-through of the biggest players on the hardest routes as things stand in 2009. There's a host of stars, including Chris Sharma, Tommy Caldwell, Patxi Usobiaga, Adam Ondra and Team America, jogging up gritstone's hardest routes. As well as sequences from Spain, Yosemite, the Mojave desert and Bishop, California, there's an excellent take on the current competition climbing scene.

Alistair Lee has gone on to make bigger films than this, but Psyche is an engaging slice of his life in 2007. Three contrasting climbing scenes are portrayed, sport climbing with Steve McClure, winter in Patagonia with Andy Kirkpatrick and Ian Parnell, and a trip to Skye with Lakes climber Dave Birkett.

Ten years after its publiction, Jen Randall brings Andy Kirkpatrick's award-winning story of Hull, divorce, thwarted dreams and high mountains to the big screen. Witty, intelligent and beautifully made, it's a fascinating enquiry into what makes a driven adventurer tick.

James Pearson’s meteoric rise as climbing’s latest wunderkind came to a juddering halt in 2009 when the route he had awarded the unprecedented grade of E12 – Walk of Life – was judged to be ‘only’ E9 by the first man to repeat it, Dave MacLeod. Having disappeared abroad for a few years, Pearson returned in the autumn to climb Rhapsody and find closure after his loss of face. This film thoughtfully retraces Pearson’s journey, exploring not just one individual’s personal motivation but some of the pitfalls of modern rock climbing too – but pulls one punch that would have made it a knockout.

Three climbers, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk put in a dogged effort on the much tried Meru Shark's Fin in the Gangotri region of the Indian Himalaya – but return unrewarded. Essentially a superior home movie, Samsara works as a kind of collage, bringing together the climbing, photographic and artistic skill of the three protagonists to produce a convincing, affable fly-on-the-wall glance at a small Himalayan team at work. Samsara won prizes at the Kendal Mountain Festival and Telluride in 2009.

Leo Houlding stars in this superior feature-length documentary about an attempt to free climb on Mount Asgard on Baffin Island. To draw a wider audience, Lee convincingly builds the kind of filmic appeal in a movie like Touching the Void, or even a Bond film, but keeps plenty that climbers will appreciate – banter on the portaledges and some impressive action sequences. The standard of photography is outstanding – look out for the northern lights playing behind the silhouette of Asgard – and the story-telling pacy, if occasionally erratic.

This outstanding film tells the story of The Long Hope Route on St John's Head in the Orkneys, from the first epic ascent by Ed Drummond and Oliver Hill, to a first free ascent – with variation – from John Arran and Dave Turnbull, and culminating with Dave MacLeod's extraordinary Long Hope Direct, graded E11. Poignant, exciting and well paced, Diffley's film does justice to one of British climbing's most remarkable stories.