The introduction of liquid-xenon (LXe) to the field of dark-matter direct detection caused a paradigm shift in this search. Primarily focused on the search for the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, LXe detectors have improved our sensitivity to these dark-matter candidates by a factor of 10,000 since their introduction roughly ten years ago, compared to the factor of 50 sensitivity improvement that the field had covered in the twenty years before that. The rapid pace at which LXe detectors have pushed the field is due in part to their ability to scale to arbitrarily large size, thereby drastically reducing the rates of background signals in these rare-event searches. Though these detectors have seen tremendous successes, each result has been accompanied by its own set of challenges to be overcome, which will also be true for the next generation experiments. I will describe the most recent such U.S.-based experiment, LUX, and highlight the key innovative analyses that led to its impressive results. I will extend the discussion to cover LUX’s upcoming LBL-led successor, LZ, which will be sensitive to WIMP-nucleus interactions as rare as roughly 0.5 events/kg/millennium. Time permitting, I will expand the view by discussing the ways in which LXe is a powerful tool for probing non-WIMP dark-matter candidates.