The Mancunion

After the success of his critically acclaimed and quintessentially Torontonian feature Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson returns with Tony: a sentimental coming-of-age biopic about how a naive kid from New Jersey rose to being the world-renowned and rebellious late chef and travel writer, Anthony Bourdain.

Credit: William Tregear @ The Mancunion The University of Manchester Students’ Union has announced that it is opening a new pub on Oxford Road. This StaffNet post revealed that they are seeking suggestions for the new venue’s name and that it will be located on the site of the old BrewDog. The brewery suddenly shut after the company went into administration earlier this year.

While 2026 hasn’t been as exciting as the previous year for gaming, there’s been some fantastic, varied releases. 007 First Light and Mina the Hollower are among my favourites, and Splatoon Raiders proved an unexpected highlight. The indie scene has also been strong with titles like Demon Tides and MIO: Memories in Orbit, though my current favourite game  of 2026 so far is one that hooked me since its first announcement at Gamescom the previous year, but one that blew me away completely by launch.

On a normal Sunday in Wythenshawe Park, south Manchester, dog-walkers and families can be spotted sprawled across 270 acres of woodland and greenery. August’s bank holiday Sunday, however, saw the usual wholesomeness of the weekend swapped for the pandemonium of The Prodigy, and their strain of hell-raising electro-punk.

The space that housed The White Hotel is set to reopen after the beloved Salford venue and nightclub revealed it would be closing in January 2027. Announced via a post from the Instagram account @bastionmcr, the space is changing hands to Franceska Melia and Will Maull, the team behind The Bag Factory, a small-capacity venue and studio situated on the same site as The White Hotel. The new venue will be called BASTION.

Long live dinosaurs. That’s the sentiment Hollywood has been trying to bloodily smear into our brains through the myriad of mediocre dinosaur films that followed Jurassic Park becoming the biggest film ever in 1993.

Less than three full months before Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto VI hits (exclusively digital) shelves, our first official look at gameplay has arrived through a 27-minute montage of PS5 gameplay and cutscenes courtesy of Netflix. This half-an-hour exclusive bite comes immediately after the elephant in the room, Cyberleek, has flooded all corners of the internet with leaked GTA VI footage, from death screens, cutscenes and general gameplay to Vice City’s nudist buroughs.

Dear 20-year-old me, You are going to spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering whether you are doing your twenties correctly. You will look around a lecture theatre and convince yourself that everyone else has figured it out. Someone has already secured an internship. Someone is running a society. Someone has posted another “I’m delighted to announce” post on LinkedIn. Someone seems to have found the love of their life somewhere between first year and a 9 am seminar.

On May 7, students opened Canvas expecting to work on revision or coursework,only to find an ominous threat from a hacker group instead of the website’s homepage. Zyra Batool, a first-year Japanese Studies undergraduate, was one of the students affected: “I wanted to submit a piece of work [that] counted towards my final grade, and Canvas would not let me.

The results of the May 2026 Union Assembly vote are in.