New releases

Inspired by a popular Spanish-language telenovela ("Yo Soy Betty, La Fea" or "I Am Betty, the Ugly"), this Cinderella-with-braces story revolves around the appearance-challenged but good-natured Betty (America Ferrera), an assistant in a high-fashion company. Betty may wear frumpy clothes and thick glasses (standard props for playing "ugly") but her romantic life is amazingly complicated, as are those of the large cast of characters at the fashion company and at her home. The third season will premiere on Sept. 25.

Family: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Drama: Then She Found Me
Action: First of Legend
Documentary: Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work
Mystery: Road House
Drama: The Boys in Company C
TV: The Office, season 4
TV: Ghost Whisperer, season 3
TV: Supernatural, season 3

(Rounder)
It's anyone's guess why, five years after the final episode of the series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," more scores from the show about the plucky blonde chosen to fight evil are being released. Granted, it was one of the best TV shows ever. EVER. But it's hard to imagine the right circumstances to play this often creepy, haunting, sometimes lilting, and often discordant CD of musical moments from the second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons. It's not exactly dinner music, unless you're actually dating a vampire. Still, Christophe Beck, who scored the popular musical episodes of "Buffy," composed, mixed, and produced these 29 tracks, so Buffyverse fans will experience aural nostalgia from the first notes.

Folk: Joan Baez/ Day After Tomorrow (Razor and Tie)
Jazz: Natalie Cole/ Still Unforgettable (Rhino)
Trip-Hop: Tricky/ Knowle West Boy (Domino)
Country: Jessica Simpson/ Do You Know (Epic)
Rap/ Hip-Hop: LL Cool J/ Exit 13 (Def Jam)
Classical: Lang Lang/ Chopin: Piano Concertos 1 and 2 (Deutsche Grammophon)
Heavy Metal: Iced Earth/ The Crucible of Man: Something Wicked, Part 2 (Steamhammer)
Rock: Joan Osborne/ Little Wild One (Time Life)

Multiple Platform (Warner Home)
If you're still suffering an angst hangover from the noir overload of the last Batman movie, "The Dark Knight," or the kids have been clamoring to know why they can't go to a movie based on a comic book, LEGO comes to your rescue this month. LEGO Batman has the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder facing their greatest foes, such as the Joker and the Penguin; darker themes are the baggage of the players, not the plot.

Annie Proulx (Simon & Schuster)
For all its might as mythology, the America frontier broke the spirit and bodies of many a cowboy and his family. Annie Proulx may be best known for her poignant story "Brokeback Mountain," but that tale of doomed love is just part of her continuum of fiction about shattered lives and dreams deferred amid harsh and beautiful landscapes. In her new collection of short stories the third volume in her Wyoming Stories series, Proulx takes the hard ride to both the Old West and the current one.