For cinemas, passive/polarized is better. Glasses are cheap, it has almost none of the shutter glass technology's disadvantages and even resolution isn't reduced because it's using two projectors.
When it comes to panels however things are not so clear. I recently bought a 3D PC monitor that unlike most other 3D-capable monitors uses passive glasses. I did not chose this monitor because I wanted passive, I just did it because using active shutter glasses under Linux is a bit troublesome, it only works with certain graphics cards, certain glasses etc. My 3D monitor on the other hand works with every graphics card and doesn't even require drivers etc.
But anyway, while I like my monitor, I have to admit that the polarized light technology it uses is not without problems. Maybe it's just a characteristic of this particular model, but the 3D effect is extremely sensitive to the viewers position. There is one spot for viewing where the 3D effect is perfect, but as soon as I move my head by just a few centimeters in any direction (even forward/backward) the 3D effect starts to become distorted.
As I said, other panels with this technology might be much better in this respect, but they still share what I consider the even bigger downside: Resolution is effectively cut in half. And it's not just that the resolution is reduced, each eye effectively really sees only half of the picture, if you're close enough to the screen it's easy to see that every second row or column is missing. And because of this the luminosity is of course reduced too, though maybe not as bad as with shutter glasses.
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