The story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel, a regular New York couple who have spent their meager salaries toward compiling a massive collection of modern art, is a great one for TV news magazines -- and shows from "60 Minutes" to "Charlie Rose" have told the Vogels' story over the years.

In fact, the Vogels have donated artworks to museums in all 50 states, including Utah State University's Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.

But in "Herb & Dorothy," a feature-length documentary about the Vogels, director Megumi Sasaki doesn't dig much more below the surface than those past TV crews have.

When we meet the Vogels, they look like an unassuming pair of senior citizens -- until they walk into a glitzy art opening at a Manhattan gallery and are treated like visiting royalty.

Since the 1960s, Sasaki's film informs us, the Vogels have been amassing an impressive collection of modern artworks, paid for by their jobs with the U.S Postal Service (for him) and the New York Public Library (for her). What's more, they cultivate relationships with artists by befriending them and buying their works over time. And the Vogels -- especially Herb, a high-school dropout who became a voracious art scholar -- have what one artist calls "an aesthetic eye."

"They look," says artist Lucio Pozzi, one of many artists interviewed in the film. "[Herb] points at the art like a hound."

Sasaki gets us up close and personal with the Vogels, revealing them to be -- exactly as advertised -- a sweet unassuming couple who have cultivated New York artists and treat them like adopted children. She also interviews a slew of New York artists, most of whom vouch for the Vogels' passion and friendliness. (The funniest story comes from the installation art stars Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who offered the Vogels a free sketch of their "Valley Curtain" project. The Vogels refused the freebie, but they did take the sketch with payment: taking care of the artists' cat.)

But what Sasaki misses is a strong effort to explain why the Vogels concentrated their collection on minimalist and conceptual art. Certainly, it would be no easy task -- those genres are among the hardest to explain to a lay audience -- but a concerted effort might have raised "Herb & Dorothy" above the level of just a cute New York story.

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